The present research tested whether children’s disability representations are influenced by cultural variables (e.g., social activities, parent education, custom complex variables) or by cognitive constraints. Four questionnaires were administered to a sample of 76 primary school aged children and one of their parents (n = 152). Questionnaires included both open-ended and closed-ended questions. The open-ended questions were created to collect uncensored personal explanations of disability, whereas the closed-ended questions were designed to elicit a response of agreement for statements built on the basis of the three most widespread disability models: individual, social, and biopsychosocial. For youngest children (6–8 years old), people with disabilities are thought of as being sick. This early disability representation of children is consistent with the individual model of disability and independent from parents’ disability explanations and representations. As children grow older (9–11 years old), knowledge regarding disability increases and stereotypical beliefs about disability decrease, by tending to espouse their parents representations. The individual model remains in the background for the adults too, emerging when the respondents rely on their most immediately available mental representation of disability such as when they respond to an open-ended question. These findings support that the youngest children are not completely permeable to social representations of disability likely due to cognitive constraints. Nevertheless, as the age grows, children appear educable on perspectives of disability adhering to a model of disability representation integral with social context and parent perspective.
Citation: Meloni F, Federici S, Dennis JL (2015) Parents’ Education Shapes, but Does Not Originate, the Disability Representations of Their Children. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0128876. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0128876
Academic Editor: Alessandro D'Ausilio, IIT—Italian Institute of Technology, ITALY
Received: February 2, 2015; Accepted: May 2, 2015; Published: June 8, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 Meloni et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files (S1 File Dataset).
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The models of disability are categorical representations from which social relations are developed, built, and understood. They are common structures for making sense of the complex phenomena of disability [1, 2]. As a cognitive organizer, a model of disability helps people to identify and explain social reaction to human, biological, and social diversity. Hence, it offers social frames  where expected behaviors and social identities are represented, helping people to make decisions and judgments .
To date, the scientific literature has identified three main disability models: individual (taken to include the medical model), social, and biopsychosocial [5, 6]. The individual model is clearly defined in Nagi’s pathological model from the 1960s [7, 8]. However, its relevance was questioned by the social model that was developed within the Marxist dialectical approach of the 1960s and 1970s [5, 9, 10]. Later, those two models were integrated into the biopsychosocial model using influences from transdisciplinary approaches and theories—i.e., integrated complexity  and system theory [12, 13] in addition to cybernetics . The biopsychosocial model avoids both the strict biological reductionism of the individual model and the socio-cultural determinism of the social model. The model also uses and finds the most authoritative and practical application in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF; ).
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