Normalization vs. Social Role Valorization: Similar or Different?.

Abstract

The radical changes towards services for persons with disabilities were brought by Principle of Normalization, originated in 1969. As a consequence of Normalization, disability as a whole, and intellectual disability in particular, received the attention of the mass and the intelligentsia begun advocating normalization ideologies which became very popular across the globe as ‘the right based ideology, which in turn, initiated integration, inclusion, community based rehabilitation and other nonsegregating practices. But ‘Normalization’ came under criticism because of its simplicity resulted in an evolution in thinking which shifted the term ‘Normalization’ to ‘Social Role Valorization’ (SRV). Although, Normalization and SRV uplifted the lives of persons with disabilities, a disagreement appeared about their similarity. The present study critically examines the guidelines of these two human services for similarities and differences upon several criteria using cluster analysis and critical analysis. The Jaccard’s Similarity Index has been computed to see similarity between documents explaining the concepts. The result revealed poor similarity index between documents explaining the concepts. It was also observed that Normalization and SRV differ from each other in their totality, but are the ways to achieve Social Inclusion.