Thinking About Disability: Implications for Practice

This chapter considers the diversity of people with disabilities, highlighting their common experiences of significant social disadvantage on all social indicators. It introduces different theoretical models for understanding disability, comparing and contrasting the orientation of each and implications for providing support services for people with disabilities. It reviews the relative merits of each approach for informing practice that furthers quality of life and highlights the drawbacks of reliance on any one model. It provides an overview of the rights-based aims of contemporary disability policy and the broad contours of individualised funding models such as the NDIS, the social demographics of people with disability and the eight domains of quality of life which form the framework for the book. It proposes the need for Both/And thinking in disability practice and the dangers of using As If as a device for obscuring difference.