Along with other historically marginalized groups, people with disabilities have organized in recent decades to claim rights to full participation in society. Often, these claims are framed as a rejection of a “medical model” of disability that focuses on the disabled person’s body as the origin of the disabled person’s problems; this concept is instead replaced by a “social model” of disability, which focuses on the social conditions from the physical environment to widely shared attitudes about people with disabilities that cause a given physical impairment to be limiting. While the social status of individuals with disabilities has improved with updates in federal legislation, in many respects, the status of disabled individuals remains below that of non-disabled people. This raises questions about the mechanisms that lead to the social disadvantages of people with disabilities.

Table 1. Comparisons of males and females with spinal cord injuries. For welfare status and marital status, differences between males and females were p < 0.001. Age and employment differences were not significant between males and females.

In examining the population of individuals with SCI in the US, various factors were examined including gender, socioeconomic status, age, as well as severity of injury and age at the time of injury. The study sample was believed to be representative of the national population of individuals with SCI. Analyses not shown in the figure compared this study sample to non-disabled peers; these data showed that, controlling for age and sex, individuals with SCI were less likely to be married than peers without SCI.
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