Disability and Social Participation

Abstract

Participation is considered a key component of many disability frameworks, yet the concept of social participation remains amorphous and contested. This chapter reviews how common disability frameworks conceptualize activities, roles, and environments in relation to participation. It then discusses challenges to measuring (social) participation through the elements of activities, roles, and environments and describes how time diary data can be used to understand daily life with disability. Finally, it analyzes the nationally representative American Time Use Survey to compare how individuals with and without disabilities spend time in 15 activity categories, across six physical locations and eight types of social interactions. Results indicate that people with disabilities spend more time at home, less time in public places, and less time in transportation than people without disabilities. They also spend more time alone and have less contact with others. However, these results depend upon activity type, illustrating the importance of integrating social and environmental contexts in empirical and theoretical models of participation differences by disability status.