Laymen as Advocates: Opinions of People with Disabilities as a Polemical Voice in the Discussion Held by Representatives of Medical Sociology and Disability Studies

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century, the thematic area of disability became the subject of academic debates and empirical research conducted in the field of social sciences within two simultaneously developing currents. Within the first one, i.e. medical sociology, attention was directed to the nature and causes of chronic diseases and disabilities, focusing on broadly understood health dysfunctions, interpreted most often on an individual basis. Within the second one, namely disability studies, the researchers’ attention was focused primarily on social problems as a source of disability (the social model) and on adequate remedies. In the social model, disability was treated as a derivative of broadly defined external constrains, and not as a consequence of bodily dysfunction. The aim of this article is to present the theoretical assumptions behind these two currents while taking into account the opinion of people with disabilities as a polemical voice in the ongoing discussion. Opinions on the nature of their own disability, its sources, and consequences were expressed by forty-five people with disabilities, who took part in the field research carried out using the technique of individual in-depth interviews. The participants generally interpreted their disability and its causes in a medical (individualistic) perspective. They treated the dysfunction itself as fundamental for building the central status, negating or ignoring the basic premises of the social model.