Developing tools to identify environmental factors as context for disability: A theoretical perspective.

A major objective in research about disability is to understand the lived experience of persons with limitations and to facilitate their inclusion in Society i the way that they would choose for themselves. For almost 200 years we have identified individuals with some impairments in our national Censuses in order to track different aspects of their existence, age, gender, living arrangements, school attendance, ability to work and in some instances their location in institutions. However, we have ignored the impact of environment on that experience because we have not had adequate measures of the environment. Though data collected in relationship to aging now has important information about the home environment, for the most part we have missed an important part of the disability equation by not accounting for environmental barriers and supports in our data. We identify the person at risk of having a disabling experience in their everyday life based either on their personal limitations or restricted participation, but have not identified anything about the context of that life that creates the participation disability. Identifying the person with limitations in their basic actions, such as walking or hearing is only identifying the “risk” for disadvantage or discrimination. The nature of the environmental facilitators or barriers are the other piece so that Type of Risk (limitations) +/− Environmental factors (barriers/supports) contributes to Level of Participation. Therefore the purpose of this discussion of environmental measurement is to identify a way to capture the social policy related environmental facilitators and barriers that most prominently support or prevent participation.