Towards inclusive practice: an insider perspective on leisure provision for disabled people

Abstract

This article discusses the findings of a recent research project that looked at non- disabled people's attitudes towards disabled customers at a community leisure centre. As a disabled person, the researcher was both the investigator and a research tool, which provided the advantage of being able to personally test out leisure provision for disabled people at the site. Both inclusive and segregated leisure services were studied, as well as informal interactions between non/disabled people outside the activity sessions. The research identified unacceptable practices against disabled people in some segregated settings, but also suggested that in mainstream sessions many individual non/disabled people were able to move past disability theory assumptions of an unbridgeable difference between them. Instead it appeared that where non/disabled people came together on the basis of their common interest in participating in leisure activities, their similarity of purpose could happily co-exist with individual difference. The study also identified a number of practical steps leisure centre managers could take to extend this inclusive ethos to the members of segregated leisure groups like those encountered here.