Impairment and Disability: Concepts and Models

Abstract

The paper briefly examines some of the major issues in defining disability, through the differences between impairment and disability (biological origins of dysfunction and social circumstances of limitation), the different approaches to disability (various treatments of disability depending on context, the scope of the treatment of disability, etc.), and the main models of disability (the medical model and the social model, some variations of the social model, such as the minority group model and human variation model, etc). The basic characteristics and implications of the medical and of the social model of disability are shown, along with several other problems of understanding, accommodating, and discussing disability.