A classification method developed by the World Health Organization to model the impacts of a disability on a person's life. In this model, disability has three components, or dimensions, in which effects of disability can be observed. These are based on impairment, activity limitation, and participation restrictions. Any particular disability may cause a positive or negative effect in all or only some of these categories. 





Three Dimensions of Disability Classification Model

The medical model positions a disability as something that must be diagnosed and addressed with medical intervention. It views disabilities as something that reduces a person’s quality of life, curing the disability as the ultimate goal. Also, the medical model promotes the image of people with disabilities as needing health care or as “sick”. Many people with the philosophy of the medical model underestimate the human capacity to learn about the complexities of the human body, and thus to make safe decisions about one’s disability.

Medical Model of Disability

The social model positions society as the disabling agent, rather than an individual’s impairment. Under the social model, an impairment is not automatically a disability. It is only a disability when society is not structured (physically, socially, or culturally) to include that impairment/variation. For example, in a society where glasses/corrective lenses are accessible and socially accepted, the impairment of having blurry vision without them is not necessarily disabling. The social model seeks to make changes in society, rather than focusing on disabled people to change.

Social Model of Disability

This model is considered to be a more nuanced approach of the social/political view of disability studies, ranging from medical to socio-political views. It explored disabilities as the interaction with the societies around them, as it was believed that one's disability is a product of the environment and bodily factors.

Cultural Model View of Disabilities

People that view disability from an educational perspective often see people with disabilities as needing assistance to become more like the rest of “us”. The problem with this view is that it promotes low expectations of people with disabilities, and assumes unequal relationships.This philosophy also assumes successful people with disabilities are heroic , inspirational, role-models, and/or courageous. 

Educational model of demeaning disability-friendly terminology

Alison Kafer determines that the political/relational model differs from the social model because it includes lived experiences of people with disabilities, in addition to potential medical treatments. 

Political/relational Model 

The Functional Model constructs disability in more subjective terms and takes into account how their impairment affects the functioning of a specific individual based on their daily purpose and tasks.  

The Functional Model of Disability 

In this piece, Paul Heilker examines autism as a form of rhetoric and how the various forces, media portrays, autistic community understandings, and cultural forces, work to construct autism as an overwhelmingly white phenomenon in public discourses. 

Autism, Rhetoric, and Whiteness

Developed by Michael Oliver, this model represents disability as culturally-constructed through centuries of medical thinking and knowledge systems. It argues disability concepts are deployed to attribute individual causes for systematic exclusion of certain bodies and minds. The model examines how medical discourse creates categories that justify social exclusion. It emphasizes material conditions and power structures behind disability construction.

Materialist Social Model

Children nodes connected include several alternate ways of classifying and defining disability

- Medical Model 
- Social Model
- Identity Model
- Human Rights Model
- Cultural Model
- Economic Model
- Charity Model
- Limits Model
- Cultural Model
- Educational Model
- Functional Model
- Materialist Social Model

Pepperdine University

Georgetown University

Michigan State University

Arizona State University

State University of New York at Binghamton

Defining disability, what it is and importantly who is included inside of it, remains controversial among different disciplines. This can lead to justice issues and denial of care for individuals who may not fit some definitions of disability and yet still identify as disabled.

Challenges in Defining Disability

Retief, M. & Letšosa, R., 2018, ‘Models of disability: A brief overview’, HTST Theological Studies 74(1), a4738

Models of Disability

Wikipedia

Mambrol, N. (2021, May 8). Disability Studies. Literary Theory and Criticism. Retrieved January 21, 2022, from https://literariness.org/2018/12/15/disability-studies-2/ 

Disability Studies (Literary Theory and Criticism)

Child nodes highlight differing systems within the American legal system to prove disability status and differing definition of disability created by different laws governing disability rights.

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