nitive process, such as when they respond to an open-ended question. In her survey of 311 parental narratives about disabled children, Avery  found that “the vocabulary spoken in the family home might serve to reinforce the inscription of the disabled child as a ‘patient’, and might promote a ‘custodial’ view of disability.” Although from a perspective of social constructionism—i.e., by bringing back to social determinants the disability explanations adopted in the parental narratives—however, Avery found the same pervasiveness of the individual model in the adult speeches.
Future research might overcome some limitations of the present study. These include, for example, increasing the sample size by also recruiting preteens (12 to 14 years olds) to better investigate the evolution of the correlation between parents’ and children’s models. This widening of the sample would permit observation about whether children’s disability models overlap more precisely with those of their parents as they grow up to confirm the trend of a certain perviousness of the disability representations to education. Finally, the present research reflects the Italian socio-cultural context, where the pressure to include disabled people in social life is a political and legal norm but not yet widespread in the social fabric, indeed. It would be interesting to see how in other socio-cultural contexts the disability models feeds people’s narratives on disability.
S1 File. Dataset.
Dataset of 152 children (n = 76) and their parents (n = 76) used in this study.
Conceived and designed the experiments: SF FM. Performed the experiments: FM. Analyzed the data: FM SF. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: FM SF. Wrote the paper: FM SF JLD.
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