[From social representation to the identity of physically handicapped people].

Abstract

Starting from two relatively independent trends of research in psychosociology, that of perception by others and that of social identity, the authors try to demonstrate the relationship between the social representation in France of physically disabled people and social identity as expressed by the members of this group. They ask physically disabled and non-handicapped subjects to evaluate themselves by means of a questionnaire consisting of pairs of antonyme adjectives; and they compare their results to those of former research which demonstrated special social representation of physically disabled persons. The results indicate that, even if in a general way the disabled do not perceive themselves as being different from the non-disabled, they manifest, nevertheless, on certain items a clear tendency to see themselves as they are perceived by others. The discussion poses the problem of the origin of this social representation of disabled people and of its possible impact on the social identity of members of that group.