Models of intellectual disability: towards a perspective of (poss)ability.
Competence is a snapshot of person-plus-context, not a permanent trait you either have or lack.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers asked South African stakeholders to sort 49 statements about intellectual disability. The group included parents, teachers, therapists, and people with ID.
Q-method turned each person's rankings into a picture of their beliefs. Four clear story lines, or discourses, emerged from the data.
What they found
People talked about ID in four ways: tragedy, charity, medical, or social rights. None saw ability as something that changes with context.
The team offered a fifth view called (poss)ability. It treats competence as a dance between person, task, and setting, not a fixed trait inside the person.
How this fits with other research
Hilton et al. (2010) urged scholars to drop static deficit models. Vargas (2013) answers that call by mapping the exact deficit stories in play and supplying a dynamic replacement.
Matson et al. (2013) also critiques school language, showing words like 'self-contained' create exclusion. Both papers reveal how talk shapes reality, one through Q-sort data, the other through spatial theory.
Benoot et al. (2026) extends the idea into residential care. Residents with ID craft 'home' in small ways staff rarely notice, proving the (poss)ability view: given the right moment, people show hidden competence.
Perry et al. (2022) makes the idea practical. Video modeling plus prompts let individuals with ID take active roles in worship services, turning context-dependent possibility into real participation.
Why it matters
Stop asking 'Can this client do X?' Start asking 'Under what conditions can this client do X right now?' Write those conditions into your session plan. Maybe it's a quieter room, a peer model, or a visual cue. Test one change next session and measure the difference. Ability is a setting, not a label.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: The social and medical models of disability configure the relationship between disability and impairment differently. Neither of these models has provided a comprehensive theoretical or practical basis for talking about intellectual disability (ID). Models that emphasise the interactive nature of disability appear to be more promising. This study explores the ways in which models of disability are reflected in disability discourse in an empirical discourse analysis conducted in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. METHODS: Q methodology was used in this study as a discourse analysis tool. Adults with ID, parents of children with ID and professionals who work with people with ID completed a sorting task where they stated the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with statements that are made about people with ID. This exercise resulted in a pattern of responses for each participant, termed a Q sort and these were used as data in a factor analysis using dedicated Q method software. A second order factor analysis was then performed on the resulting factors. RESULTS: Four discourses were identified: the Social Model/Human Rights Discourse, the Medical Model/Professional Religious Discourse, the Community Model/Community Religious Discourse and the Interactive Discourse. Except for the last one, each of these discourses adopts a model of disability with a static view of impairment as fixed. The Interactive Discourse appears to be related to dynamic, environmental conceptions of disability where competence is built through social interaction. CONCLUSIONS: A theory of (poss)ability is proposed and some of its concerns are suggested. This perspective views impairment as an interaction between individuals and their environment and postulates that competence is a function of context, rather than a property of the individual.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2013 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2012.01547.x