ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that categorical approaches are needed to reveal structural and persistent identity-based inequalities and consolidate political consciousness, alongside anti-categorical approaches that aim to respect the agency and complexity of individual research participants. Disability, as a parameter of social identity, is highly associated with inequality in development outcomes. The understanding of the inequalities linked to disability is strongly associated with the competing ways in which it has been defined. The bio-psychosocial model has been presented as a way of integrating the physical, embodied aspects of disability with societal factors. The bio-psychosocial model, taking a person-centred approach, emphasises the importance of understanding disability as a continuum, with impairments only a part of the determinants of the range of abilities of each person, which constitute the human condition, and which vary between all individuals and vary across our life-cycles.
