Social change as a category of analysis of attitudes towards disability issues

Abstract

This paper addresses a relationship between the social change and attitudes towards disabled people as well as attitudes of disabled people towards their own health status and its social consequences. These attitudes are clearly related to the characteristics of successive types of societies, i.e. pre-industrial societies and industrial society. On this basis, the directions of further changes of attitudes towards disability can be predicted adequately to the megatrends of postmodernity. The analysis presented in this study showed that a development of attitudes towards disability, both one’s own disability and a disability of others, requires not only changes concerning this category of people, but also a widely understood social change, which modifies the existing structures and creates new ones, thus increasing the chances of finding a position for the entire humanity and social groups However, these opportunities for disabled people are, despite the ongoing changes, still lesser in comparison to the opportunities of healthy people with similar socio-demographic and competency characteristics. They are though simultaneously greater and greater, which has been demonstrated in the analysis of attitudes towards the problems of disability in traditional and industrial societies presented in this paper. On the other hand, the analysis of megatrends of postmodernity confirms that  such equalizing and integrating tendencies will continue to persist.