Mobility Impairment and the Construction of Identity focuses on why people with mobility impairments choose or do not choose to identify as disabled persons. Drawing from both quantitative and qualitative data, Ridolfo and Ward examine the multifarious factors involved in the process of constructing an identity. The authors demonstrate how disability is a much more complex phenomenon than many might have anticipated.
Rather than impose a disabled identity on the mobility-impaired persons in their studies and thereby reduce these people identities to a biological category, Ridolfo and Ward afford their participants the opportunity to express their identity in their own terms. The result is the recognition that a disabled identity does not emerge as the result of one or multiple physical impairments, but that a disabled identity emerges in the complex interactions between an embodied individual and the social and physical world.
Ridolfo and Ward argue that there is a need for more extensive models of disability than the medical and social models. The authors show that current models do not yet account for the complex dynamics between self-processes, biological factors, social barriers and how the multitude of these phenomena collectively influences identity. In the place of more limited models, the authors propose a conceptual model that seeks to build on the success of previous models by incorporating and integrating the medical and social model into a larger sociological (symbolic interactionist) framework. Ridolfo and Ward examined both qualitative and quantitative data in developing their conceptual model.
As part of their quantitative project, the authors examined the National Health Interview Survey on Disability (NHIS-D). These data come from 1994–1995. In an analysis of the results of the NHIS-D, Ridolfo and Ward found that reflected appraisals had a significant influence on whether or not adults identify as disabled. As part of their qualitative project, the authors interviewed 30 adult participants with mobility impairments. These qualitative interviews corroborated the findings of a quantitative analysis of the NHIS-D.
The findings showed that while many individuals employ a medical model if asked to define ‘disability,’ both the physical impairments and social feedback are crucial determinants of whether or not an individual identifies as disabled. Additionally, the qualitative analysis revealed fluidity in some respondents’ conceptions of their impairment, thereby revealing that a third group, those still negotiating their identity, lies between ‘identifiers’ and ‘disidentifiers’ (91).
Controversially, Ridolfo and Ward suggest that race, age, and social class played little role in influencing a person to avow or disavow a disabled identity. However, they do not explore the uneven social distribution of physical impairment according to these factors. On the other hand, the authors suggest that gender does play a significant role in influencing a person to identify as disabled or not, with women having significantly lower odds of identifying as disabled than men. Many women eschewed a disabled identity through reflected appraisals, particularly in the case of mothers or primary caregivers who viewed their role as caregivers as contradictory to their potential disabled identity.
The authors close with a brief discussion of the implications their findings have on both theory and policy. Ridolfo and Ward note that their results signifies the need for future researchers not only to integrate medical and social models, but to supplement these models with an investigation of the role social comparisons, self-presentations, and self-appraisals play in how an individual makes sense of the complex dynamics that constitutes life as an embodied agent in a social and physical world.
One of the problems with this book is that the authors do not do enough to acknowledge that their employment of the term ‘self’ ultimately refers to an individual’s meta-concept of self. As I see it, the self is a multi-dimensional phenomenon with the meta-concept as one of its primary dimensions, but the self cannot be reduced to a meta-concept.
Another problem with Mobility Impairment and the Construction of Identity is that the data upon which it is based are quite dated. The data come from 1994–1995. Some of the data, therefore, were collected when the Americans with Disabilities Act had only been in effect for four years. A whole generation of people has grown up since that time with this civil rights protection in place, and that may change the results of studies of disability identity significantly.
Department of Philosophy
The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA
[email protected]
© 2014, Walter Scott Stepanenko
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.934062