Sociology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2804
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Item "It's Not Like I Can Just Pause Diabetes:" How People Living with Type 1 Diabetes Navigate Relationships, Reproduction, and Parenting(2023) Maietta, Justin T.; Doan, Long; Cohen, Philip N.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation draws on 26 qualitative in-depth interviews to explore how people who live with type 1 diabetes (T1D) navigate three important and intimate areas of life: dating and relationships, reproduction, and parenthood. Applying a sociological disability framework to this research, I explore how participants’ trajectories and outlooks, decisions, and feelings of agency and self-efficacy in these areas of life are influenced biographically, structurally, and culturally on account of living with T1D. Each of the three substantive chapters of this dissertation is an article that examines the relationship between living with T1D and either dating and romantic relationships, reproduction, or parenthood. First, I argue that dating and relationship norms and expectations can be rooted in ableist ideals that marginalize potential partners living with impairment or disability. I also demonstrate the importance of two kinds of support that dating partners offer to participants living with T1D: tangible support and incorporative support. Both kinds of support work against assumptions made about dating and relationships among people living with impairment or disability. I then examine facets of living with T1D occurring at multiple analytical layers (structural and cultural, interactional, self, and body) across the life course and how they influence whether people with T1D feel having children is something they want or need or is within their reach. This article enriches our understanding of disability by demonstrating that individuals with less noticeable or visible disability are subject to similar social imperatives of risk management and moral reproduction as those with more noticeable physical or sensory disabilities. Finally, I discuss how participants think about and practice balancing caring for their T1D and caring for their children, as well as how they reconceptualize “good parenting” within an intensive parenting culture that expects child-centered and self-sacrificing parenting. I also discuss how adults who grew up as children and adolescents with T1D reflect on how they have been and continue to be parented regarding their T1D, leading them to challenge norms of “expert-guided” parenting within an intensive parenting culture. This challenge is made through advocating for more agency, autonomy, and expertise grounded in embodied experience to be afforded to children and young adults with T1D in ways that supersede the expertise of doctors and researchers. Overall, this dissertation illustrates: (1) how experiences, interpretations, and representations of disability at multiple analytical levels have the power to remove some feelings of agency and self-efficacy from disabled people throughout the process of reproduction, in their dating lives and romantic relationships, and in their roles as parents; and (2) the ways that individuals with disability adapt to, challenge, and disrupt the norms, ideologies, and assumptions that marginalize them in these intimate areas of life.Item CONSTRUCTING A DISABLED IDENTITY: THE INFLUENCE OF IMPAIRMENT, SOCIAL FACTORS AND REFLECTED APPRAISALS(2010) Ridolfo, Heather; Milkie, Melissa; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The claiming of an identity as disabled has important implications for impaired individuals' interpersonal interactions and well-being, however not all impaired individuals claim a disabled identity. In this dissertation I build upon social and medical models of disability by extending the work in two key ways using multi-methods. First, using a symbolic interactionist frame, I examine how individuals' experiences are mediated through self processes in shaping their identity claims. Second, I assess how the identification process is influenced by individuals' social statuses. Data used in this study is from the 1994-1995 National Health Interview Survey on Disability, a large nationally representative sample of individuals with impairments. In addition, I supplement this analysis with data from 30 qualitative interviews. Results underscore prior research showing that not all individuals who experience impairment identify as disabled. The qualitative interviews illuminated a third group not obvious in the quantitative analysis - those in the process of negotiating a disabled identity. Experiences of socially constructed barriers have important implications for claiming an identity as disabled; however experiences of impairment also have strong effects on identity claims. In depth interviews also showed social barriers, but not environmental barriers, and impairment affect impaired persons' identity claims as disabled. Self-processes perform an important role in helping impaired individuals understand their positioning in society and verify their identity claims. Reflected appraisals of being disabled increased the likelihood of claiming a disabled identity and these appraisals mediated the relationship between the experiences of socially constructed barriers, impairment and the self. In the qualitative analyses, social comparisons and self presentations were also found to be an agentic tool used by individuals to assert their identities as disabled/not disabled and in shaping others' views of them. Finally, social statuses have important implications for the construction or rejection an identity as disabled. Those with higher social statuses were MORE likely to claim disabled identity, all things equal. In the qualitative analyses, women's disabled identity claims were often disregarded, perhaps underscoring their more difficult experience verifying their identity claims. Consistent with this, interactions between social statuses and the social and medical models were identified.