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"This interpretive literature review of cultural beliefs and attitudes about disability in East Africa identified themes in four categories including (a) the causes of disability, (b) attitudes towards disability, (c) treatment of people with disabilities, and (d) language about disability. Referencing the medical, social, and pluralistic frameworks for conceptualizing disability, the authors sought to compare and contrast East Africa with perspectives about disability common in the developed world. Implications for policy and practice are discussed"
Review of Disability Studies : An International Journal, Vol 8, Issue 1

This paper reviews the process and outcome of constructing a "rights model of disability" which is culturally specific to Jordan and Lebanon. The objective of the empirical part was, to survey the current level of attitudes of non-disabled people towards their disabled fellows in Jordan, and to compare the attitudes of Lebanon's university students towards five different categories of disabled people (mentally disabled people, psycho-socially disabled people, physically disabled people, hearing impaired people and visually impaired people) to highlight the variations and diversity among them. It also examined the relationship between the attitudes and various demographic and social characteristics of the respondents. The set of findings was further tested and triangulated through meta-analysis of individual views expressed in the qualitative studies.

In Jordan, the attitude of 191 randomly selected non-disabled people was studied, using a Scale of Attitudes towards Disabled Persons (SADP). The participants from 4 communities of Jordan, exhibited overall negative attitudes towards disabled people. Socio-economic-demographic characteristics showed almost no difference regarding their attitudes towards disabled people.

In Lebanon, a more complex scale, composed of four sub-scales, namely a, "Baseline Survey of Student Attitudes towards People with a Disability" was used, to survey 94 university students' attitudes towards five different categories of disabled people, and a set of indices for future comparison was constructed. The results indicated the same pattern of gradations of attitude differences (found in other countries) towards persons with physical or sensory impairments (better), intellectual impairment (middle) and mental illness (worse). The main findings of this empirical field research showed particularly negative public attitudes towards people with intellectual impairment and mental illness in Lebanon.

Finally, the validity of the proposed rights model of disability and the empirical findings of this study, were further examined and co-validated through analysis of the collective views of those who took part in the questionnaire surveys and the participatory focus group discussions, which took place in Lebanon in 2005 and 2007, and in Jordan in 2005, as well as a series of intensive on-line and/or telephone interviews of a few informants comprising of disabled persons and experts. The policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Asia Pacific Disability Rehabilitation Journal, Vol 19, No 1

Internal migration in South East Asia raises questions about strains upon traditional systems of support for older adults. While remittances to parents’ households play a role in rural household economies, uncertainty remains regarding whether and under what circumstances children interact with their elderly parents. This paper focuses on the adult children of older persons living in rural Cambodia and Thailand and examines the determinants of personal visits, monetary remittances and more general forms of household support. Analyses considers ways in which geographically distant children support parents, the extent to which characteristics of parents, children and households enhance or detract from these inter-generational interactions, and how determinants of inter-generational interaction vary between the two countries. Comparisons between countries of conditions and characteristics of families provide insights into how social, economic, and cultural forces motivate provision of support to aging parents

This report documents the results of a project to explore disabled children’s (11 – 16 years old) experiences, and their perceptions of impairment; of services; and of their social relationships with family, peers and professionals. The study involved over 300 children in a range of settings and used qualitative methods.
The research highlighted an atmosphere of resentment towards the comparatively high levels of adult surveillance disabled children faced, as opposed to their non-disabled peers, along with the varying degrees to which the word ‘disabled’ and the concept of disability had been appropriated and understood by disabled children themselves. Finally, it alluded to the presence of multiple barriers to inclusion (as generally understood by the social model) that disabled children were still facing on a regular basis

This bibliography contains references to 156 resources on understandings of and attitudes toward disability, published between 1898 to 2000