What is it about?
Not everyone who has a medical or psychiatric condition would say that they have a disability. We wanted to understand if there were differences between people with diagnoses who considered themselves disabled vs. those who did not consider themselves disabled. We looked at different demographic categories (race, gender, age, etc) and psychological variables, such as self-esteem.
Featured Image
Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Many research studies and services ask people if they have a disability. However, if someone does not believe they have a disability, this does not mean that they do not have a medical or psychiatric condition. This study shows that there might be patterns as to who does vs. does not self-identify as disabled. Therefore, it is important for researchers and service providers to carefully think about how they ask questions and screen people into services. Otherwise, they risk excluding people that they might be interested in including.
Perspectives
This article was inspired by difficulties that I had when trying to figure out how to ask people on surveys whether they were disabled. I had to think about what I was interested in. For example, did I care if they self-identified as disabled? Did I care if they had a particular diagnosis? Did I care how their disability impacted their daily functioning? I ended up using multiple ways of asking this and then thought it would be interesting to see if there were inconsistencies in the data.
Rachel VanDaalen
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Chronic conditions and disability self-identification: An exploratory analysis of sociodemographic and psychological correlates., Rehabilitation Psychology, March 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/rep0000662.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
