Abstract
This article reports the results of an original quantitative linguistic study that investigated patterns of language use referring to people with disabilities in three data source types: written by support groups run for and by people with disabilities, healthcare researchers, and healthcare providers respectively. Quantitative content analysis was used to categorize the language use in a target sentence in each of the 9000 data sources in terms of whether it emphasized the person (person-first language) or the disability (non-person-first language) following published guidelines. Statistical analysis was conducted using appropriate logistic regression models. There was a significant increase in the use of person-first language in healthcare research articles over the time period 1994-2013, although it remained a minority usage. Use of person-first language was significantly higher in documents produced by support groups run by people with disabilities than in documents produced by healthcare researchers and practitioners. This suggests that healthcare researchers and providers may be more likely to refer to people with disabilities in terms that emphasize the disability rather than the person. Further research is required to confirm these patterns and investigate whether there is a disparity between the wishes of people with disabilities and the language behavior of healthcare researchers and practitioners.
Highlights
“Words can reflect as well as influence the way people think” (United Kingdom Office for Disability Issues, How to cite this paper: Barnish, M. (2014)
Organizations including the United Kingdom Office for Disability Issues, the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA), and the Research and Training Center on Independent Living (2013) have all published guidelines advocating the use of language that emphasizes the person rather than the disability that he or she may happen to have
Person-first language was used in 19.50% of articles analyzed. 13.50% of articles from the time period 1994-1998 used person-first language compared to 25.80% of studied articles published between 2009 and 2013
Summary
“Words can reflect as well as influence the way people think” (United Kingdom Office for Disability Issues, How to cite this paper: Barnish, M. (2014). Organizations including the United Kingdom Office for Disability Issues (undated), the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) (undated), and the Research and Training Center on Independent Living (2013) have all published guidelines advocating the use of language that emphasizes the person rather than the disability that he or she may happen to have. Calling this “person-first language”, ASHA (undated), for example, advises that “disabilities are not persons and they do not define persons, so do not replace person-nouns with disability nouns”, such as “the aphasic”, “stutterers”, “the hearing impaired” and “depressed patients”. It aimed to be fundamentally a linguistic investigation with dual relevance to linguistics and healthcare researchers
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