People with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States and comprise about 19% of the general population. SPSP member Kathleen Bogart is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Disability and Social Interaction Lab at Oregon State University, where she researches Ableism, or prejudice and discrimination directed toward people with disabilities.
Kathleen studies ableism from the perspectives of both the target and the perceiver. She came to this area of research as a result of her own experience as a person who identifies as disabled. She lives with facial paralysis, and, after speaking with other members of the disability community, she came to the realization that the stigma she experienced was not due to her specific diagnosis, but was a result of ableism toward people with disabilities as a group.
“Like any research on social or minority identities, it is very important that people with those identities are included in the research process, and the lack of social psychologists studying facial paralysis and disability, in general, motivated me to address this need,” Kathleen said.
Kathleen’s early research centered on the stigma that people with facial paralysis experience because of their inability to express emotions with their faces, their unusual appearance, and having a rare disorder.
She identified an adaptation strategy for these individuals, compensatory expression, by which people with facial paralysis communicate through increased expressivity via channels other than the face. Studies indicated that people with severe facial paralysis are perceived as less happy than those with mild facial paralysis, but this perception was reduced through the use of compensatory expression by the targets.
Her research currently focuses on many different disabilities, and she applies theories including social identity theory to look at disability identity. Her lab has found that positive disability identity—known as disability pride—is associated with higher levels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, life satisfaction, and additional positive outcomes.
“Our research on the Rejection-Identification model shows that experiencing stigma may prompt disability pride, which seems to protect self-esteem. Disability pride seems to have a lot of benefits, yet is rare,” Kathleen said.
“The majority of disabilities are invisible. Like other minority groups in which stigma is concealable, people avoid disclosing or ‘coming out’ to avoid personal stigma. This only serves to perpetuate stigma by making disability seem uncommon and undesirable. Like other minority groups, a critical mass of disabled people coming out and expressing pride will reduce stigma at a societal level,” she explained.
Ableism is a very significant barrier to employment for people with disabilities. Academia provides a useful example: only four percent of faculty members have disabilities, according to The National Center for College Students with Disabilities, while 19% of the population is disabled.
Additionally, only two percent of psychology faculty reported a disability to the American Psychological Association—which could indicate an even greater underrepresentation of people with disabilities than in academia overall, a hesitancy to disclose disability status due to stigma, or a combination of these factors.
Kathleen has been surprised by both the underrepresentation of research on disability in social-personality psychology and the underrepresentation of social-personality psychologists with disabilities. In order to help connect other social psychologists interested in disability issues, she created the Social Psychology of Disability Network Listserv.
“Disability is a common human experience that involves many social psychological processes including prejudice, social identity, attribution theory, and social cognition, but it is rarely discussed in our field,” she said.
October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Interested readers can learn more about hiring faculty and graduate students with disabilities by reading, “The Neglected Demographic: Faculty Members with Disabilities” and “A Call to Professors with Invisible Disabilities”.
The American Psychological Association website also offers Disability Employment Resources and a resource guide for psychology graduate students with disabilities.
DARN Community Members Share Advice and Inspiration for Graduate Students with Disabilities
