Elizabeth Depoy

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Maine

While numerous models of disability have been advanced, the medical and social approaches dominate, juxtaposing disability in contradistinction from the normal. In this article, we propose a philosophical reinvention of disability, altering an essentialist normal/not normal binary and thus moving to seamless amalgam of diverse bodies and behaviors...

Evidence-based practice is highly valued by health professionals for its predictive capacity. Yet, as affirmed by the NASDDDS/AUCD Evidence-Based Policy Initiative, this approach to health care may inadvertently contribute to inequity of access to health support services and policy. This study was conducted to examine how health professional facult...

While forensic analysis often conjures images of criminal justice investigation, it is actually a valuable and innovative analytic process to identify “what went wrong” as the empirical basis to inform creative repair and advancement. This poster presents an innovative forensic educational process and its evaluation in a disability studies curricul...

This article presents the engineering design and preliminary testing of the AfariTM mobility device and the integrated IntracTM activity tracking system. The patented Afari design is a three-wheeled mobility device that assists users of any age with mobility impairments with outdoor exercise and movement in various environments and surfaces. We dev...

Chapter 1: Legitimate and Offending Bodies Over the past 4+decades, the impairment definition of disability, referred to as the medical model, has been pommeled by disability studies scholars. Early social theorists wrested disability away from the impaired body and located it in the terrain of social, attitudinal, political, economic, and even spi...

This poster presents research investigating assets and unmet needs of aging farmers with disabilities, a diversity population that is often omitted from research, analysis, policy, and services. The session will detail the research and then, based on the findings, attendees will be guided through analysis and discussion of how AUCD can respond.

In this paper we discuss and analyze contemporary disability policy within an expansive conceptual framework. We conclude with a "balanced meal" for thought and nourishment of policy action.

A 74-year-old single African-American woman with a fractured hip will be discharged shortly from rehabilitation to her home. She appears reluctant to use the self-care techniques you taught her. You wonder whether rehabilitation has been effective in meeting its specified goals and what her future capabilities will be after she returns home. You h...

This easy-to-read edition covers all the major research design strategies: qualitative, quantitative, naturalistic, experimental-type, and mixed method. And with the text’s up-to-date research information and references, you will have a solid foundation from which to critique and understand research designs and their applications to healthcare and...

Over the past three decades, discursive analytic epistemologies have become central tools within the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. Particularly within the United States and Western European academic discourses, theorising disability as linguistic artefact has been potent in wrestling atypical embodiment away from its medical defici...

Despite the magnificent navigation apparatus contained in the organic corpus, human mobility has always been aided by objects and technologies necessary for all people to move safely and efficiently throughout urban through rural environments. Why some devices are "read" as deficiency and dependency while others with identical functionality elevate...

Chapter to be publiished in an upcoming book on Urban Caring Geographies

this is the first chapter of an integrative practice evaluation research text.

Over the past several decades, disability and social work have become increasingly strange bedfellows, in large part due to the espousal of the medical model of disability on the part of social workers. This approach locates disability with the body as a deficit in need of repair, revision, or ongoing professional scrutiny. In opposition to this ap...

Over the past fifty years, design and branding have become omnipotent in the market and have made their way to other domains as well. Given their potential to divide humans into categories and label their worth and value, design and branding can wield immense but currently unharnessed powers of social change. Groups designed as devalued can be unde...

Over the past several decades, design and branding efforts for social justice and democracy have exponentially increased. Designers have apprehended and applied market strategies to create products and images to change the world. However, to date, design and branding have not been analyzed to understand and reassign their power in creating, labelin...

Emerging from an opposition to medical deviance theories of the 20th century, sociology and related disciplines have brought potent intellectual frameworks to an expanded, non-medicalized analysis of disabled bodies. Yet, scholars have only begun to directly engage in interpreting embodied disablement and responses to it as microcosm, meaning, and...

Purpose – This chapter discusses a study in which we examined campus architecture, spatial design, aesthetics, and cultural policy with regard to the manner in which attributes in these visual and textual entities shape the full range of diversity of the student body or the individuals and collective group who study within the university. Methodolo...

Purpose – This chapter discusses a study in which we examined campus architecture, spatial design, aesthetics, and cultural policy with regard to the manner in which attributes in these visual and textual entities shape the full range of diversity of the student body or the individuals and collective group who study within the university. Methodolo...

In concert with the conference theme of healthy communities promoting healthy minds and bodies, this session discusses and illustrates the interdisciplinary synthesis and research application of disability studies and state-of-the art engineering to improve communities, public health, and advancement of full participation. We focus on the use of sm...

Presenting fully integrative text covering disability from a variety of disciplines This innovative text first reviews existing theories, then sets forth a new viewpoint that incorporates elements from disability studies, sociology, human services, rehabilitation counseling, and public health. Authors Elizabeth DePoy and Stephen French Gilson explo...

Epidemiological surveillance, or counting and analyzing the magnitude and causal factors of a population's health status and intervention needs, has been a major epistemic and ontological foundation of public health. Within the past several decades, disability and its subsets increasingly have been the object of surveillance. While this trend is we...

Over the past four decades, definitions of and responses to disability have undergone significant change. Challenging embodied medical deficiency as an essential characteristic of disability, the field of disability studies has become a viable and growing locus of inquiry, praxis and activism, and too frequently an opponent of health professional f...

Sports and fitness engagement are critical to the health of all people. Not only are they are sources of personal enrichment and esteem, but provide physiological, psychological and social benefits essential to the promotion and maintenance of optimal health and wellbeing. Unfortunately, unless individuals are members of or involved with formalized...

This article describes an intervention model for occupational therapists who treat individuals with traumatic brain injury. The model moves occupational therapy intervention beyond traditional skill acquisition in the clinical setting to the promotion of role function in the client's community environment. Concepts from the Model of Human Occupatio...

Given the primacy of global economics and marketing mind-sets, this article interrogates current views of diversity as a phenomenon of "bodies and backgrounds" design and branding. We begin by examining the concept of diversity and its lexical and conceptual history. We then briefly review relevant design and branding concepts and proceed to apply...

In concert with the conference theme, Public Health Without Borders we discuss, illustrate, and critically evaluate an innovative web-based portal designed to expand full access to health promotion education, knowledge, and communication globally. The 21st century is characterized by the omnipotence of technology in all aspects of personal and comm...

Until late in the 20th century, disability was conceptualized primarily as an embodied deficit, creating and perpetuating disability as the object of medicalized professional intervention and in many cases exclusion and segregation. This view, while still a dominant explanatory theme for disability, by itself, is limiting to social workers who seek...

In this chapter we discuss and analyze contemporary disability policy in the United States through a policy analytic lens based on Explanatory Legitimacy Theory. This progressive theoretical framework distinguishes among descriptive, explanatory, and axiological or the legitimacy dimensions of human classification and responses to category members....

Professional accountability has become central to both public and private sectors. Governments have emphasized and even developed empirical models, logic modeling, and evidence-based practice in the programs they support, and not-for-profit, for-profit and NGO entities increasingly rely on systematic strategies such as strategic planning, marketing...

This chapter presents and analyzes the scholarly basis and empirical work that resulted in the development of Techscape, the application of collaborative technology use as one approach to achieving the larger aims of Civilscape. Civilscape, a loosely networked collaborative university-wide effort on a state-supported university campus in the United...

Over the course of history, the human body has been both object and subject of diversity, legitimacy, worth and response. In early western civilizations, bodies that exceeded the limits of what was socially and culturally acceptable were pronounced as non-human and left to die. While this response may seem extreme, the variability of bodies, what m...

In This paper, we discuss and illustrate an innovative multi-faceted prevention research model, relevant to the full range of social and health problems experienced by global communities. The difficulty of directly observing the outcome of prevention efforts on health and social problems has limited the potency of traditional experimental and quasi...

The Human Experience is a comprehensive text that examines, analyzes and applies theories of humans, environments and human-environment interaction to professional thinking and action. Through the lens of their original theory, Explanatory Legitimacy, the authors differentiate descriptive from explanatory theories, and analyze the purposive, episte...

This clearly written, easy-to-understand book demystifies the research process and provides a rational foundation from which to critique and understand research designs and applications in health care and human service settings. Divided into five parts - Introduction, Thinking Processes, Design Approaches, Action Processes, and Improving Practice T...

Social work literature and practice are replete with reference to the concepts of self-determination, choice, empowerment, and self-advocacy. These concepts take on particular importance when considered in relation to individuals with disabilities and to the work of social work professionals with disabled individuals. However, despite a common perc...

This article advances a three-step model for engaging adolescents in shaping their own health care supports and services through systems and social change that rely on principles of force field analysis. Consistent with health promotion values and trends for evidence-based practice, force field analysis provides a systematic and multilevel approach...

A qualitative study of disabled and non-disabled professionals and survivors of abuse revealed a range of types of abuse endured by disabled women, some of which were unique to that population. Two major themes emerged from data analysis: vulnerable beginnings and complexity of abuse. Three sub-themes are encompassed within complexity of abuse: act...

This book provides a theoretical lens through which to view Disability. Rather than taking a medical-diagnostic stance, which has been the traditional perspective, the authors explain disability as category in which membership is based on of judgments about explanations for what people do, experience and how they appear. In Part I, the authors disc...

In this chapter we focus on social work practice with rural disabled elders. After discussing the tension between nomothetic and idiographic thinking about populations, we advance a definition which embodies both. Rural disabled elders are therefore a diverse set of members who both share some commonalities and are rich in their diversity and diffe...

This text presents both the quantitative and qualitative methods and focuses on teaching students how to skillfully apply the full range of research designs, methods and strategies to evaluation of social work in all domains of social work practice. The book provides a framework for the integration of systematic inquiry with practice that can be us...

This article presents an analysis of disability theory and content in the social work curriculum and advances a theoretically expansive approach to disability that is consistent with social work's commitment to diversity and the elimination of oppression. A careful examination of relevant social work literature reveals that disability is generally...

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The study presented here, which relied on naturalistic design and focus-group methodology, examined the experiences of abused women with disabilities and the women's use of and need for services and resources. The study found that although disabled and nondisabled women face many of the same forms of abuse, disabled women have unique experiences th...

Women with disabilities are abused at rates similar to or greater than their nondisabled counterparts. Compared with nonabused women, women abused by an intimate partner have a greater risk of being disabled or having an illness that affects their activities of daily living. Although disabled women experience similar forms of abuse to those of nond...

In an effort to counter discrimination and powerlessness, the disability community has espoused sociopolitical and cultural factors as defining characteristics of disability identity. This view of disability has replaced the historical medical model of disability as a deficit, and has had important implications for social action, political agendas,...

This study was part of a large multi-method inquiry designed to examine the service and support needs of adolescents with special health care needs who are transitioning to adulthood. A multiple case study methodology relying on life history was used to ascertain perspectives of the parents on the longitudinal events and factors in the lives of ado...

In response to the important philosophical and methodological questions being asked in social work, this article presents a model for social work knowing that is founded on the tenets of critical theory synthesized with principles and practices from action research. The model provides the essential empirical support for social work interventions an...

This paper presents an innovative AIDS prevention program that was conducted in a rural American Indian community. The project consisted of three phases: Needs Assessment and Planning, Implementation, and Follow-Up. Through a collaborative process, project staff and community members and leaders developed and implemented culturally valued and credi...

This article describes the process and outcome of an innovative, interdisciplinary educational effort which was initiated in rural Maine. Within the context of a comprehensive, statewide interdisciplinary rural health care training project that was federally funded through the Interdisciplinary Training for Health Care for Rural Areas (ITHCRA) gran...

The study presented here examined how 218 elderly rural women defined and sought to maintain their health and examined the extent to which social networks, age, endurance, adaptation, and proactivity are related to health. It found that the respondents viewed health as the absence of illness and considered giving and productivity essential to their...

The study presented here examined the attitudes of 218 rural elderly women toward receiving professional and governmental assistance. The results indicated that although the respondents had little familiarity with governmental programs, they were generally in favor of increased assistance for people in need. The relationship of these constructs to...

A survey was sent to program directors of 498 social work schools to explore the developmental disabilities content in their curricula. The survey measured developmental disabilities content in terms of course content, practice opportunities, research opportunities, and value content. The response rate was 28.9%. Results indicated that very few sch...

This article presents a study which was implemented to investigate successful community living in rural non-elders with chronic physical disabilities. Based on the results of an initial naturalistic study, a survey design was used to identify factors which distinguish persons with disabilities between the ages of 16-65 in institutional settings fro...

As advances in medical technology increase the life span, social workers committed to quality of life for elderly people are faced with practice challenges. Preserving the autonomy and civil rights of elderly people in guiding their own health care even if they are unable to articulate preferences has become an important area of social work interve...

As community inclusion efforts continue to develop, the recognition of the capacity and rights of persons with cognitive and learning difficulties to participate in planning their own programs has been increasingly acknowledged by providers. This paper presents a needs assessment which was conducted with a small group of people with disabilities, t...