Engaging with Disability Services: Experiences of Families from Chinese Backgrounds in Sydney

ABSTRACT

People from Chinese backgrounds remain underrepresented in disability service use. This paper explores family experiences of using child disability support services to understand how migration and their cultural expectations about disability and service affect the way they use services. Qualitative semistructured interviews were conducted with 13 family carers in Sydney. They were striving to gain good support for their child from formal services. However, most of them were reluctant to express any dissatisfaction to service providers, which meant that assertively requesting different support was difficult and culturally inappropriate. In response, service providers can design nonconfrontational ways to elicit this vital information and support families to gain experience tackling conflict.

残障服务设施的使用，华人的表达一直较弱。本文探讨了使用儿童残障服务机构的华人家庭的经历，以理解华人移民及其对残障和残障服务的预期如何影响他们对这类服务的使用。本文对悉尼十三位家庭看护者做了半固定的定性访谈。这些家庭努力从正式的服务机构那里为孩子获得优质的支持，但多不愿对服务提供者表示自己的不满，因为明确要求不一样的支持会很困难，而且文化上也不得体。因此，服务提供者可以设计非直来直去的方式让他们传达出关键的信息，使之获得解决矛盾的经验。

KEYWORDS:

• Families
• People with Disabilities
• Service Use
• Chinese Backgrounds
• Australia

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the three organisations in Sydney that made this study possible and thank the participants. Ethics approval was from UNSW Sydney.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was from the Australian Research Council [grant number LP120200219].