ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with very different conditions of people’s lives, and argues that the approach to social assessment is consistent with the contemporary disability movement’s approach towards seeing disability of any kind as significantly defined and created by social factors. Disability has conventionally been attributed to individual biological differences, but disabled people have argued that it is a society dominated by the vested interests of able-bodied people that disables them, by not taking account of the needs and rights of disabled people. In terms of social assessment, therefore, the individual life of a disabled person needs to be studied in socially structured contexts, where social divisions are seen to connect and interconnect in specific, time-related ways. The critical auto/biography linking of oral and life history with critical developmental psychology is designed to provide an adequate basis for grasping the full range of factors involved, including the voice(s) of the disabled.
