Measuring the influence of the media on the social adaptation of people with disabilities

The article analyzes the system of indicators of social adaptation of people with disabilities, ways of typification, and attempts to develop a scheme for sociological measurement of the impact of mass media on development of a particular type of social adaptation of disabled people. The study of the media influence on the consciousness and behavior of people with disabilities is important because of their greater susceptibleness to the mass media. It was necessary to identify the criteria for social adaptation of the disabled people and the impact of the media thereon. For this, the fundamental foreign and domestic approaches to measuring social adaptation have been studied. The western concepts of social adaptation include functional, role, psychoanalytic, cognitive, interactionist, phenomenological ones. The specifics of domestic research is shown, which consists in affirming the position of the key role of the subjective factor, that is, the active position of the individuals themselves in the process of adaptation to the society, their views, settings, attitudes to what is happening and their own capabilities. The subjective factors of adaptation are largely determined by the information space. Consequently, an important resource for the adaptation of disabled people is the broadcast of such mass media discourses that would contribute to development of an active life position for people with disabilities. The article represents various typologies of social adaptation of the disabled people. Analysis of contemporary publications based on the results of empirical studies of social adaptation has revealed a serious gap between a rather deep theoretical elaboration of the notion of social adaptation and the narrowness of the indicators used. Moreover, among the empirical indicators of social adaptation, there are no indicators of informational, in particular, mass media influence. A critical analysis of approaches to the typification of social adaptation made it possible to group all the criteria of social adaptation of the disabled people into two sets: objective and subjective. Detailed structuring of both is carried out. A detailed scheme for measuring the mass media effect on social adaptation of the disabled people is proposed, which makes it possible to establish a dependence of the development method of the type of social adaptation of the disabled on the content of media reports on people with disabilities and the strategy of information behavior for people with disabilities.

social adaptation, disabled,  mass-media influence

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