Missing Pieces: Engaging Sociology of Disability in Medical Sociology

Mapping What Sociology of Disability Does

In contrast to medical sociology, the sociology of disability has a conceptualization of disability informed by distinct theoretical foundations and research aims. Although disability is still understood as a “health status,” it is emphasized primarily as a unique social category (commensurate with race, class, or gender) made up of a heterogeneous and expansive population with varying impairments or diagnoses (Frederick and Shifrer 2018; Naples, Mauldin, and Dillaway 2019). This does not mean that specific diagnoses or impairments are irrelevant, but that these usually serve as an organizational feature of research. For example, the particular experiences of those sharing a disability type might be taken up in an empirical study, but such a study would not only be about better understanding that specific condition and subpopulation but also be about expanding scholarship committed to the larger goal of theorizing and understanding disability as a social category. Disability is thus not solely constituted as a medical classification; rather, it is positioned as an axis of inequality decoupled from any particular impairment.

A quick survey across the subfield demonstrates how framing disability as an axis of inequality and social category is central. Scholars emphasize how structural factors and social norms produce individual and community experiences (e.g., Altman and Barnartt 2001; Thomas 2007). They measure the exclusion of disabled people, such as their high unemployment rates (Maroto and Pettinicchio 2014) and the inaccessibility of health care systems (Meade, Mahmoudi, and Lee 2015), and adhere to the tenet that “disability is both a cause and consequence of poverty” (Department for International Development 2000:1). Structural arrangements are also analyzed for their disproportionate effects on disabled people. In the United States, for example, a lack of a universal health care system and a byzantine and highly restrictive system of support for disabled people (i.e., programs such as Social Security Disability Insurance and Medicaid) entraps disabled people financially and geographically (Grossman 2019; Stapleton et al. 2006). Scholars in this subfield also document how disability produces culture and identity (e.g., Grue 2016; Mauldin and Fannon 2020).

Importantly, sociologists have been examining disability for decades. In their volume of Research in Social Science and Disability, Green and Barnartt (2017) curate a rich set of articles detailing the often overlooked histories of disability in sociology and trace a path back from the more recent sociology of disability research to seminal scholarship analyses. Overall, in the sociology of disability subfield, even when particular impairments are studied, there is an appreciation for how disability as a broad social category is structurally produced, characterized by profound inequality, and intersecting with other axes of inequality (Frederick and Shifrer 2018; Naples et al. 2019). In much the same way that medical sociologists acknowledge that health disparities involve a substantial array of often overlapping physical, psychological, intellectual, and behavioral health conditions, scholars working in the subfield also tend to adapt a similarly inclusive frame of what constitutes a disability. ²

The Role of Disability Studies

To understand how the sociology of disability came to have these features, it is necessary to locate its roots in the history of the disability rights movement and the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of disability studies (DS). As the disability rights movement in the mid-twentieth century coalesced around the mantra of “nothing about us without us” to protest societal exclusion (Shapiro 1994), these activist roots later developed into the interdisciplinary field of DS in the 1980s (Shakespeare 2013). Importantly, this movement was not organized around any one particular impairment but, rather, around disability as a category writ large. Although different impairments may have specific challenges or particular needs, the movement coalesced around the broad social exclusion of disabled people regardless of impairment even as movements organized around particular impairment types co-occurred (e.g., Barnartt and Christiansen’s [2003] work charting the Deaf cultural movement).

Simi Linton’s (1998:1) foundational text, Claiming Disability, articulated DS as “a location and a means to think critically about disability, a juncture that can serve both academic discourse and social change.” Importantly, she notes that many disciplines study disability, but DS was about reclaiming disability as an aspect of identity and recognizing disability as socially constructed. This articulation is still important; scholars may study disability, but they may not necessarily be engaging in DS. Fifteen years later, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2013) published a seminal piece articulating DS as a field already emerged. She categorizes DS as part of the first wave of “identity studies fields,” noting that the “expansion beyond health science perspectives on disability to consider it a civil and human rights issue, a minority identity, a sociological formation, a historical community, a diversity group, and a category of critical analysis in culture and the arts constitutes the signature move of critical disability studies” (p. 917). Today, although the disability rights and disability justice movements that were crucial to the emergence of DS persist, there are both activist and scholarly communities. Scholars in DS work across a variety of intellectual traditions (the majority of which are in the humanities or “area studies”). For example, Disability Studies Quarterly, the flagship journal of the Society for Disability Studies, publishes work across fields like history, literary criticism, and cultural studies as well as the social sciences. The journal Disability & Society is more social science based.

An important piece of the disability rights movement and DS history that may not be known by medical sociologists, however, is that the beginnings of DS were grounded in sociology. The foundational idea that built on the disability rights movement was the “social model of disability,” which was articulated by British sociologist Michael Oliver in 1983 (Shakespeare 2013). The social model argues that disability is socially produced through structural and cultural arrangements that exclude individuals with various types of impairments. The distinction between impairment and disability is central; disability is a social process, not an inevitable or “natural” result of an individual’s impairment. These social processes highlight the sociological aspects of disability: “[It] goes beyond the personal limitations that impaired individuals may face, to social restrictions imposed by an unthinking society. Disability is understood as a social and political issue rather than a medical one” (Oliver 1998:1446). More recently, the social model has been critiqued as oversimplified and scholars have moved on towards more nuanced theorizations (e.g., Kafer 2013; McRuer 2018; Mitchell and Snyder 2015; Shakespeare 2006).

To further demonstrate the sociological roots of DS, revered medical sociologist Irving Zola was one of the founders of the Society for Disability Studies (for a review, see Scotch 2002) in the United States and pioneered much of the early work at the nexus of medical sociology and disability studies (e.g., Zola 1982; including in this journal: Zola 1991). Despite the role of sociology—including medical sociology—in the founding of DS, important intellectual and institutional barriers have hindered the development of the sociology of disability subfield. Green (2017) outlined how the American Sociological Association (ASA) rejected calls for a section on disability until 2010, rendering the subfield only a very recent development. Green (2017) suggests that this bureaucratic resistance, rather than being negligible, reflects larger disciplinary practices of marginalization of disability and has had a role in perpetuating it. This is because the larger discipline tends to think of disability only as a niche “area study” rather than an axis of inequality core to the discipline’s commitment to understanding stratification and power. There is also no sociological journal that can be claimed as a “home” for disability scholarship, making it difficult to place disability scholarship in the discipline. No sociology programs specialize in disability (a review of the ASA website shows that even the Section on Disability in Society refers sociologists and students to interdisciplinary disability studies programs), and this in turn leads to a diminished pipeline of graduate students in sociology that study disability.

Although social and political aspects of health/illness are within the purview of medical sociology and sociology of disability, disability scholarship has not been easily absorbed into medical sociology. Indeed, there is often a gulf between these subfields related to how social and political aspects of disability are conceptualized, analyzed, and interpreted. To explain why that is, Thomas (2007) describes two competing frames: Medical sociology, informed by symbolic interactionism, frames disability as social deviance, whereas sociology of disability, informed by disability studies, frames disability as social oppression. Past scholarship on disability in medical sociology adheres to a more individual or medical model of disability. One could link this to the influence of Parsons’s (1951) sick role to symbolic interactionism and its links with stigma (for further analysis, see Barnartt 2017). Even though medical sociology has moved beyond the sick role, an “overarching social deviance paradigm” (Thomas 2007:15) persists in framing disability as individual deviance. Thomas (2007:135) suggests that medical sociological scholarship on disability or chronic illness would be better classified as research on “impairment effects.”

Meanwhile, as DS scholarship develops, deeper theorizing is beginning to cultivate a disability analytic as a mode of analysis rather than only a subject area specialization (Minich 2016; Schalk 2017). Minich (2016:paragraph 6) describes how this analytic “involves scrutinizing not bodily or mental impairments but the social norms that define particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations.” In other words, one can view a disability analytic as an approach or perspective, not just research that focuses on disabled people (Schalk 2017). As Friedner and Weingarten (2019:485) further note:

Whereas “women” might have once been the object of focus for feminist theory, or “black people” might have been an object of focus for critical race theory, or “queer people” for queer theory, as each of these fields developed, theorists began expanding feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory to consider how these theories could help us understand systems of power, underlying assumptions, and also the absence of historically marginalized groups in texts or situations.

The development of this analytic, as we detail in the following, is seen in a shift to focusing on ableism in addition to seeing disability as a social category. As these developments move forward in other disciplines, sociology—and particularly medical sociology—has yet to meaningfully take up such theoretical questions and integrate them into analyses. In a recent literature review of the highest ranking generalist sociology and medical sociology journals, Stoll and Egner (2021) find that sociologists largely fail to employ a critical approach when studying disability. Certainly, there are more complicated questions regarding how subspecialties in sociology should relate to other “area studies” fields; here, we articulate productive and identifiable steps that could be taken to bring sociology up to date with the broad array of other disciplines that have taken DS seriously. In the following section, we demonstrate specific ways a disability analytic could address gaps in the three major themes in medical sociology research of the past 20 years previously noted.

Extending the Literature on Fundamental Cause and Social Stress

Although the literatures applying fundamental cause and social stress theories are concerned with status differences and social conditions, one glaring gap is the lack of engagement with disability as an axis of inequality. An exception is research on disability and stigma in these literatures in its acknowledgment that many health conditions represent potent forms of social disadvantage that expose individuals to status loss, discrimination, and resulting feelings of social devaluation (for a review, see Phelan et al. 2008). But even this literature has not engaged with the concept of ableism. As disability scholarship has progressed, there has been a shift toward conceptualizing ableism, which “like other ‘isms’ such as racism and sexism, describes discrimination towards a social group, in this case disabled people, but it also describes how certain ideals and attributes are valued or not valued” (Friedman and Owen 2017). Campbell (2009) and Wolbring (2008) both emphasize that ableism is more than a preference for nondisability but instead is a set of values, institutionalized and codified into systems and structures, that privileges certain bodies/minds and features over others. Wolbring (2008:253) goes so far as to say that ableism is the “umbrella-ism” on which other -isms like racism are based. This is echoed by recent disability justice work by Lewis (2019), who identifies ableism as “rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, colonialism and capitalism” and defines ableism as “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on socially constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, and excellence. . . . One does not need to be disabled to experience ableism.”

Taking ableism seriously in medical sociology would assist in a better understanding of illness and disability experiences, particularly those of disabled people of color, in health care settings (and beyond). For example, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare how disabled people are targeted as a broad category, with multiple states releasing triage plans where disabled people would be excluded from receiving treatment (Disability Rights Education & Defense Fun 2020). A recent incident, captured on video, revealed a black disabled man denied treatment for COVID-19 because, as the doctor put it, “He did not have a quality of life” because he was paralyzed prior to acquiring COVID-19 (Roberts 2020). Disability scholars have long critiqued the notion of “quality of life” and argued that ableism is endemic to medical education, clinical interactions, and medical decision-making (Longmore 1995; Peace 2012), but such processes remain largely unexamined in medical sociological research.

Meanwhile, the impacts of bias such as racism and sexism are already well accepted as stressors that adversely affect health (Anderson 2013; Perry, Harp, and Oser 2013), and the experiences of stigma and discrimination are described as a fundamental cause of health inequities (Hatzenbuehler et al. 2013). Medical sociologists have shown that health care providers possess the same level of bias as the general population and that this bias affects health outcomes. In a systematic review of the literature, implicit bias was found to be “significantly related to patient–provider interactions, treatment decisions, treatment adherence, and patient health outcomes” (Hall et al. 2015:e60). Although medical sociologists have rarely addressed biases regarding disability and ableism that providers bring to their work, disability scholarship shows that providers and students in medical school overwhelmingly possess ableist attitudes that affect their interactions with patients and determinations about “quality of life” (e.g., Saxton 2000). We are not suggesting a competition of -isms, but that discriminatory systems interlock and that ableism plays a key role in this interlocking that has thus far been largely ignored. Areas such as health services research and medical education should consider disability when looking at disparities in care and outcomes as well as ableism as an important form of bias to investigate.

Like other minority groups, people with disabilities experience health disparities that are not functions of their condition but that derive from ableism that often goes unrecognized (e.g., Iezzoni 2011; Krahn, Walker, and Correa-De-Araujo 2015). Interestingly, recent literature on countering the negative effects of racism suggests that positive cultural identification, strong community ties, and a positive self-concept are possible interventions that may help mitigate disparities (Okeke-Adeyanju et al. 2014). Likewise, studies indicate that positive disability identification contributes to healthy self-concept, self-esteem, and increases in well-being (Conrad and Barker 2010; Lumsdaine and Thurston 2017). The large body of scholarship in medical sociology that exists on these issues offers a unique opportunity to engage discussions of ableism and contribute to understandings of how disability and ableism appear in the structure and culture of health care and, among other things, affect outcomes.

Extending the Literature on Medicalization and Medical Authority

Another major strand of research concerns medicalization and medical authority, particularly the ways in which medicalization processes have changed and medical authority has shifted (see Clarke et al. 2003; Conrad 2005). Medicalization has been a central concern to disability scholarship because the social model, a critique of an individual or medical model of disability, can be fundamentally understood as a critique of medicalization. That is, medicalization studies are partly rooted in a disability analytic. Echoes of this (although not explicitly stated) are particularly apparent in Zola’s (1972) original conceptualization of medicalization arguing that it depoliticizes and individualizes, which Conrad (2005) later noted results in the narrowing of what is acceptable as “normal” in society. The interconnected roots of medicalization studies and disability studies can be seen in Rothman’s (1993) Tentative Pregnancy, in which she identifies ableism in the clinical culture surrounding amniocentesis. More recently, research has emerged on whether and the extent to which certain conditions should be medicalized (e.g., Blum 2015; Davis 2015; Mauldin 2016) and how medicalization relates to the politics and experiences of disability. Incorporating critiques of ableism would further extend medicalization studies in productive ways, such as by asking how the larger “engines of medicalization” (Conrad 2005:7) are ideologically fueled by ableism. This could lead to examination of how belief systems about disability and which bodies or minds are desirable motivate medicalization and public acceptance or rejection of it.

Conrad (2005) also states that industries such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnologies, genetics, and enhancement are spurring medicalization. There is a rich literature at the intersection of disability studies and science and technology studies (STS) that demonstrate how a disability analytic can assist in identifying the intersection of disability and normalization tactics in particular technologies and industries and how biotechnologies are co-constitutive of disabilities that have direct effects on disability identities (e.g., Forlano 2017; Moser 2006; Winance 2016). For example, Mauldin (2016) writes about the emergence of the technology of cochlear implants and how their existence changed not only what constituted “good care” when it came to rearing deaf children but redefined deafness to a brain processing problem. In STS, technologies are seen as part of the overall constitutive process of what disability is and how individuals “should” respond to it and demonstrate that ableism is often the answer to why one pursues such technological endeavors in the first place. This offers possibilities for medical sociology to further understand such processes of medicalization and biomedicalization.

Scholarship in medicalization and medical authority has also revealed the shift from passive patients to active “consumers” and social agents. Conrad (2005) notes that structural shifts in favor of biotech, big pharma, and managed care often take agency from social movements and interest groups. Taken at face value, and without a more nuanced understanding of the context of Conrad’s work, these shifts could be viewed as new phenomena. However, it must be acknowledged that Conrad’s work is informed by decades of scholarship on disability social movements demonstrating the creative persistence of numerous movements in responding to such pressures (e.g., Barnartt and Scotch 2001; Grue 2016). Indeed, earlier sociological work was not just about social movements; it emerged as a direct result of them (Shakespeare 2013). In the United States today, disability justice movements are increasingly shaping the field of disability studies, too (e.g., Berne, Morales, and Langstaff 2018). We suggest that medical sociologists examining disability and illness communities mindfully incorporate scholarship about or direct movement work by those with disabilities.

Finally, another site of convergence related to social movements and disability absent in medical sociology has to do with the lack of care infrastructure in the United States and, for example, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We wish to point out the potential of political affinity between what might be thought of as illness, aging, and disability communities, especially as they converge around the politics of health care in the United States in the context of neoliberalism. The recent fight to preserve the ACA is a political phenomenon ripe for analysis through a disability analytic, as are fights for universal home care. Cranford’s (2020) recent work shows how disabled people and ill and/or aging folks are actively aligning to fight for more adequate home care funding in the United States. This is particularly important now given that more than 42% of all COVID cases are linked to nursing home residents or staff (Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services 2021). We need more work showing how ableist ideologies underpinning neoliberal thinking and policies (i.e., only “productive” bodies are valuable) result in growing movements born out of political affinities between chronically ill, aging, and disabled folks.

This is further buttressed by recent work by Charmaz (2020), who writes that we must situate stigmatizing processes within larger structural arrangements, particularly within neoliberalism. On this, Charmaz (2020) is correct, but there is already much work in disability studies that has put forward these theoretical analyses (e.g., Chaudhry 2015; Erevelles 2011; Goodley and Lawthom 2019; McRuer 2018; Mitchell and Snyder 2015). Broadly, this literature argues that neoliberalism is dependent on ableism: “Ableism accounts for the stifling practices associated with a contemporary society that increasingly seeks to promote the species typical individual citizen: a citizen that is ready and able to work, productively contribute, an atomistic phenomenon bounded and cut off from others, capable, malleable and compliant” (Goodley and Lawthom 2019:235). Scholars writing on these issues suggest that “the absolute centrality of disability to a now global politics of austerity has rarely been theorized explicitly or comprehensively” (McRuer 2018:4). This literature could aid sociologists in expanding theoretically and empirically on this front.

Extending the Literature on Experience and Social Construction of Illness

The study of illness experiences has also been key to the sociology of health/illness in the last 20 years. The social deviance frame of disability in medical sociology persisted under the influence of symbolic interactionism in the sociology of health/illness, where a central line of inquiry became understanding how illnesses are socially constructed and how these meanings shape the experiences of people living with one—considering, for example, the extent of disability, time spent disabled, and the timing in life of disability onset (Susman 1994). This can be seen in the many earlier works (e.g., Charmaz 1993) that examined chronic illness primarily as disruption and stigma management at the individual level. Works in this strand, however, often leave out the role of social and structural aspects of ableism and especially what disability studies scholars refer to as “internalized ableism” (Campbell 2008:156), wherein negative internalized notions about disability result in attempts to pass as able-bodied, lowered expectations of the self, and disdain for “dependency.” Indeed, one of the tenets of ableism is a fetishistic prizing of “independence,” seen in Charmaz’s (1993:80) study, in which disability was so devalued that for her ill participants, “dependency remains a greater specter than death.” This phenomenon has yet to be deeply engaged with in medical sociology.

Earlier studies on stigma management also dovetail with scholarship investigating how people who experience chronic illness or disability seek or oppose a disability label and under what circumstances. Charmaz’s (1993) study suggested that the label of disability was fraught with stigma and negative association. Other work delves into the complexity of self-identifying as disabled in greater detail. Perhaps the most direct response to work equating disability with stigma is that demonstrating that the label of disability can provide a sense of relief because it provides an organizing framework for understanding physiological symptoms and the adaptations or changing circumstances they sometimes endeavor (Gilmore and Somerville 1994). Others document the importance of social experiences even when accounting for changes in health: For example, Kelley-Moore and colleagues (2006) show that self-identification as disabled is associated with changes in social networks, home care, reciprocity in social relationships, and the ability to access social activities and not simply with health changes. Elsewhere, disability scholars like Allison Carey (2009) have shown how disability social movements utilized labels regarding intellectual disability to forge alliances and gain access to services.

The stigma associated with the label of disability has received significant attention in research on the experience of mothering and disability, especially as it pertains to education. This work examines how disability is an axis of inequality that intersects with others, such as race. Blum (2015), for example, writes that black mothers may be more resistant to labeling their child as disabled, whereas white mothers may have less resistance. Fish (2019) also writes about how these labels play out in school settings, particularly noting the intersection of race and disability. Because there are hierarchies of disability (i.e., some disabilities are more stigmatized than others), there are certainly more “high-status” disabilities that may be attributed to white students.

We see hints of a nascent disability analytic in more recent scholarship focused on experiences with chronic illness that incorporate discussions of how chronically ill people may manage the issue of being identified as disabled. Barker (2005) briefly notes the tensions between legal definitions of disability and how stigma around drawing disability benefits negatively shapes opinions about those with fibromyalgia. This begins to hint at ableism and to locate disability within a structural frame; this is similar to Leiter’s (2007) work on how disability is constructed through early intervention regulations and diagnostic categories, which in turn shape how families interact with systems. Kempner (2014) also engages with the larger cultural delegitimization around the chronically ill experience, especially as external ideologies about disability shape experiences of migraine. She argues that people with migraine do indeed experience it as a chronic, invisible disability, but they deal with trivialization and blame, expectations to overcome, and moral questions of deservedness. In short, she is describing ableism and hinting at how ableism constrains individuals regarding diagnosis, labeling, and membership within the larger disability category. She also references the disability rights movement and how some in her study deploy the frame of disability and must defend against assumptions of laziness that often accompany beliefs about disabled people. More explicit engagement with ableism in the analysis of empirical data such as this has much to offer medical sociology; conversely, medical sociologists potentially have much to offer in scholarship on disability.

Overall, we see potential for a shifting theoretical trajectory in medical sociology regarding experiences of illness or disability. As Scambler and Scambler (2010) note, most studies of illness experience still focus on a personal tragedy model of illness—a medical model derivative—and generally adhere to a deviance paradigm. But the social deviance model of illness has been critiqued as inadequate by sociologists (Conrad and Barker 2010). Indeed, Charmaz (2020) articulates that the conceptualization of disability as deviance within the symbolic interactionist frame is a result of the influence of Goffman’s (1963) work on stigma. Charmaz (2020) then engages the work of sociologist of disability Barnartt (2017), who critiques how stigma is seen as “stable” and casts disabled people as embodying a form of deviance and leaves it at that. Charmaz (2020) concedes that the symbolic interactionist tradition has generally ignored structural causes of disability oppression but maintains that it is entirely possible—and desirable—for symbolic interactionists to contextualize interactions and experiences within social structure. Such a reflection might signal an openness for the influence of what Thomas (2007) referred to as a social oppression frame, or what we have highlighted as a disability analytic, to be better integrated into the sociology of health/illness.

One way that disability scholarship could be better incorporated into the social construction of illness literature is to focus on the generative or transformative aspects, rather than it being about solely “tragic” notions of impairment effects or managing stigma. Disability scholarship documenting the experiences of disabled people reveals identity formation (Grue 2016; Linton 1998) and expertise. Disability expertise is an important concept for medical sociologists concerned with health, illness, and knowledge production. Disability expertise, put forth by Hartblay (2019:S34), a medical anthropologist trained in disability studies, is “the particular knowledge that disabled people develop and enact about unorthodox configurations of agency, cultural norms, and relationships between selves, bodies, and the designed world.” Similarly, Mitchell and Snyder (2015:2) write that we must engage “the active transformation of life that the alternative corporealities of disability creatively entail.” And as mentioned in the previous section, there is work in STS and disability that examines the ways in which technologies, particularly assistive technologies, prosthetics, and so on, co-construct experiences of disability.

A frame of disability expertise positions disabled and ill people as knowledge producers and active agents in their lives while stressing that their bodies/minds are in tension with structural arrangements not designed for them. How might deeper and more disability-informed analyses broaden the scope of understanding experiences of disability and/or chronic illness? How do disabled individuals come to navigate a world hostile to them, what does this reveal, and how is it achieved? How is the ability to navigate inflected by intersections with race, class, and gender? We see these as questions that require greater collaboration between medical sociology and a sociology of disability to answer.

Incorporating Disability into Reflexivity

Contemporary ethnographic methods are characterized by a commitment to reflexivity on the part of the researcher. Although not all research projects in either subfield should employ qualitative research methods, we want to emphasize how knowledge from sociology of disability could factor into reflexivity practices in medical sociology research (regardless of whether it is a qualitative or quantitative study). Reflexivity is an examination of how biased assumptions of the researchers influence their design and interpretation of data (Berger 2013). As we have outlined, it is not yet standard sociological thought that disability is an axis of inequality and that ableism is a culturally dominant value system and form of discrimination. Most sociologists are not trained to attend to their disability status as a factor in reflexivity, even while we are often taught to think about other social positions we occupy. Yet sociologists are not immune to bringing ableist assumptions into their work, and this can shape many aspects of the research process, including how disability is framed in research and how participant experiences of disability are asked about and interpreted.

To address the missing disability analytic in reflexivity practices, we recommend the following for all sociologists, but especially those researching disability and illness: (1) Reflect on how commonsense notions of disability as inherently undesirable or a deficit may influence all stages of research, from how the questions are posed to paternalistic or pitying attitudes toward participants to myopic focus on the “tragedy” of disability; (2) be aware of assumptions that ill or disabled people do not have agency or are not knowledge producers (or that they are not also sociologists doing research and bringing unique and important perspectives to such work); and (3) inform oneself of the appropriate language to use when describing these communities.

We also recommend the following as ways that sociologists can begin to incorporate a disability analytic into their reflexivity practices: (1) noting and examining one’s own disability status and committing to investigating and understanding how that shapes research, (2) investigating cultural knowledge produced by disability communities that one is studying, and (3) not solely seeking out and consulting “experts” on the populations one is studying without including disabled or ill people as part of the experts. Regarding our first recommendation, this is not to prescribe who can and cannot do research on ill or disabled communities but, rather, a suggestion for researchers as to how to bring the social category of disability into our standard practices of reflexivity. Acknowledging one’s disability status in the research design phase can assist in helping us reflect on the kinds of questions we ask participants, the kinds of frames we may choose to understand our data, and so on. One early example of this is Zola’s (1982) Missing Pieces, which includes deep reflection on his status as a disabled person and how this shaped the research. As stated earlier, disabled people possess expertise through their lived experiences, and many become experts (and indeed contest the very notion of expert) and researchers themselves. We therefore recommend including disabled people from the populations being studied, whether through including them as research participants or consulting them as part of the research design team. If it is the latter, we endorse following the recommendation of federal funding agencies by appropriately compensating those individuals for that expertise. Integrating a disability analytic or consciousness into research practices means recognizing that disabled people are persistently marginalized in work about their own communities. When they are utilized informally as knowledge producers, they may rarely be financially compensated for it, furthering marginalizing practices that disenfranchise disabled people. Our recommended practices reflect a commitment to addressing ableism in research and a starting point for addressing it in sociological research.

Disability Methodologies

Sociology of disability scholarship has long grappled with the substantive focus of research and ways that a disability analytic can inform methodological choices, data-collection procedures, and overall research goals. Oliver (1992), who developed the social model of disability, introduced “emancipatory research” as a critical form of inquiry and critical praxis (which he states is influenced by feminist methodologies). Oliver (1992:108) critiques the grounding of disability research on the individual as “seeing the problems that disabled people face as being caused by their individual impairments. These rock-bottom explanations not only see disability as an individual problem but in so doing they reject other possible explanations.” More specifically, he describes the ethos of emancipatory research in the following way:

Disability research should not be seen as a set of technical, objective procedures carried out by experts but part of the struggle by disabled people to challenge the oppression they currently experience in their daily lives. . . . Do researchers wish to join with disabled people and use their expertise and skills in their struggles against oppression or do they wish to continue to use these skills and expertise in ways in which disabled people find oppressive? (P. 102)

Barnes (2003) notes that emancipatory research overlaps with later methods like participatory action research. This body of methodological scholarship informed by a disability analytic could be useful to medical sociology.

Meanwhile, medical sociologists, such as Bell (2017), have also advocated for innovative qualitative methods, particularly visual methods, to be used to more seriously engage with the embodied experiences of disabled participants. There are also numerous other resources that discuss disability research, highlighting how to design inclusive research protocols and take various access needs of disabled people into account (e.g., Berger and Lorenz 2016). Other methodologists call for disabled participants to be actively involved in the co-construction of knowledge (e.g., Caldwell 2014). We share this information not to be prescriptive but to make medical sociologists aware of such methodological debates over disability, especially as they reflect on research design and goals.