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Analisi qualitativa assistita dal software Atlas.ti dei modelli di disabilità: la prospettiva di genitori, insegnanti e educatori professionali
Abstract
Introduction. Identifying proper disability models that inform social and educational relationships of pupils with disabilities is an important step forward in the analysis of those “communicative stimuli” that affect the development of young people with disabilities (Federici, 2003), even beyond parental relationships. Moreover, a survey aimed to know the points of view of parents, teachers and educators might offer precious and rare information on the dissemination of principles stated in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF; WHO, 2002) as well as on the biopsychosocial model for different categories of people living in the same educational environment, but coming from different cultural and social backgrounds. Objectives. To explore any possible representation of disability which would orient opinions, attitudes, and behaviours in 83 individuals (teachers in regular schools and special teachers, parents of children with or without disabilities, social and medical staff, professional educators) in order to investigate the relationship between disability, adaptation, socialization and development as well as to contribute to the dissemination of the biopsychosocial model introduced by the ICF. Method. The experimental objective has been checked through qualitative analyses, by means of the Atlas.ti software, for text coding and interpreting on 16 focus group, a tool purposefully chosen to detect all those aspects connected with the primary objective, which, by means of quantitative analyses, uses the chi-square distributions. Results. The social model of disability is a very well known model to all professional groups, except for specialized teachers. Nevertheless, only parents of children with disabilities and regular-class teachers seem to strongly be willing to adhere to such a model. Whereas specialized teachers, social and medical staff and professional educators claim for a “transition model” which oscillates between the social and the biopsychosocial models, parents of children with no disabilities start from a different perspective oscillating between medical and social models. Conclusions. Results from the qualitative analysis, using both manual and computerized (Atlas.ti software) procedures, show varying perspectives on disabilities, other than medical, social and biopsychosocial models. The poor dissemination of the biopsychosocial model among parents highlights the lack of a vision which is “open” to personal development, social growth, improvement of the standards in the quality of life. This suggests a priority: the need for extending training and educational occasions also to parents, in order to promote a more effective management of personal and environmental resources to face disabilities of their children, in the aim of developing and actually promoting a new “culture of diversities”.
... In fact, the parents of non-disabled range between the social model and the medical model, while support teachers show an oscillation among all three models of disability. Finally, the bio-psycho-social model does not prevail in any group (Federici et al., 2006). ...
AIM: understand the social representations of disability in the school context METODOLOGY: purpose-built questionnaire with open answers, consisting of 10 questions, was used. RESULTS: -the operators interviewed undoubtedly framed the disabled student in a non-medicalization perspective, albeit with qualitative differences; -all teachers and all parents have de facto provided representative modalities that are often collusive between themselves; -only the families of students with disabilities can provide significant information on therapeutic opportunities or previous educational experiences that may give relevant results in terms of both behaviour and profit.
This study examined the perspectives of parents of children with specific speech and language difficulties in the United Kingdom and described the issues they raised when considering provision to meet their children's needs. The study used a mixed-methods approach. Data from interviews were analyzed using a computer-based qualitative interview analysis method (ATLAS/ti; Muhr, 1997), with reference to evidence from a parent-completed rating scale and assessments of the children's language and educational development. The issues generated by the analyses were considered in relation to whether the child attended mainstream or special school. Results are discussed in the context of current educational policies for inclusive education and parental participation in meeting children's educational and social needs.
In Participatory Action Research (PAR), group processes are central in facilitating change and focus groups are widely used by action researchers. However, the epistemological basis upon which focus group practice is grounded has not been closely examined and its transformational role has been taken for granted. This might impede the development of the focus group as a distinctive research practice and the realization of its transformational potential. Against the background of three participatory action research projects carried out in the National Health Service of the UK, the author shares her experience of using a variety of focus group methods for facilitating change in health promotion practice. Practical examples are used to explore the relationships between focus group practice and its epistemological grounding. It is suggested that the transformational potential of the focus group lies in the equal value placed on different ways of knowing by an extended epistemological framework and the dynamic of knowing and doing embedded in the PAR process.
This article explores narratives of parenting a child with impairments for insight into impairment as both a materially and socially meaningful phenomenon. Drawing from in-depth interviews with parents, a narrative approach is employed to explore the ambiguities of human impairment and embodiment as experienced by an intimate other. Parents’stories illustrate impairment as an intersubjective and intercorporeal accomplishment and illustrate multiple locations of meaning of impairment within the context of intimate social relationships. Narrative approaches have largely been identified with research on embodiment from the perspective of disabled people; it is argued that narrative accounts of embodied others may avoid dualisms of objective/subjective and social/natural that trouble current theoretical approaches to impairment.
Over the last 15 years, social scientists increasingly have used focus groups as a method for collecting qualitative data. With focus groups, a moderator uses the group process with a small number of participants to stimulate discussion and obtain information on the beliefs, attitudes, or motivations of participants on a specific topic. Based upon a review of a sample of social work articles, researchers used focus groups to study a wide range of topics, with diverse and vulnerable populations, and in combination with other qualitative or quantitative methods. Although focus groups have limitations, they have the potential to be an important qualitative data collection method to capture information about the variety of issues and populations dealt with by the social work profession. In addition, social work researchers have the potential to further develop focus groups as a qualitative research method.
Focus groups are a useful method for sociological research because the sociable interaction that is generated can yield rich insight into people’s life worlds. This is because the nature of the talk that is generated in focus groups is a mixture of personal beliefs and available collective narratives that are further flavored by the local circumstances of participants’ lives. The interactions between participantsin focus group discussions characteristically comprise layers of talk and present researchers with complex analytical tasks. In addition to what participants say about themselves, analysis and interpretation of focus group data must pay attention to the content and form of interaction between participants. This article discusses and illustrates how sociable interactions from focus groups were analyzed for insights into classed contexts for romantic relationships.
This article is a comparison of the narratives told by and about parents of children who are blind or visually impaired. The narratives in this article come from the author’s own experience raising a child who is visually impaired, from conversations the author has had with other parents of blind and visually impaired children, and from published accounts of parents’ experiences of raising visually impaired children. In addition, this article synthesizes the metanarrative told in the social scientific literature about parents of visually impaired children. This narrative comparison demonstrates that disability is located in the interplay between individuals’ physical bodies and society’s constructed meanings of difference. This article posits that the lived experiences of parents who are raising visually impaired children in a sighted world do not mirror either the medical or the social models of disability, but lie somewhere in between.
This article considers the significance of a model of disability in relation to the child with profound impairment and examines the individual and social models of disability in connection with this. It is argued that although these two models cannot be completely dismissed, the models largely ignore the experience and perspective of the profoundly impaired child, their parent(s) and family. Following in-depth interviews with four parents I attempted to elicit the experience of disability from this perspective. I invited the parents to tell me the ways in which they experience disability, how they viewed the nature and cause of disability in their lives and the relationship between themselves and the various professionals involved in the care of their child. This article endeavours to implement the interview 'findings' to inform an alternative model of disability, the 'Alliance' model, which is briefly discussed and critiqued.
The paper reviews common uses of models and terminology, then sketches a few social responses to disablement in historical Zoroastrian, Jaina and Daoist philosophies. Accompanying a discussion of the 'merits of uselessness', Chuang-tzu's holistic social model is reconstructed. A Buddhist tale of 'hunchback Khujjutara' suggests that karma may usefully be seen as an educational, rather than retributive force. Contested histories of blind Japanese and Chinese people, and the dramatic enactment of contradictory behaviour towards them, support the view that Asian meanings of disablement should not be forced into modern European categories, but may challenge and refresh them.