Between the ideal and the real: Reconsidering the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: The World Health Organization's (WHO) International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is a disability classification and framework that was endorsed in 2001. Despite its endorsement from WHO member states, some rehabilitation researchers have argued that the ICF has been used and requires further inquiry. The purpose of this article is to examine the ICF critically using a feminist theoretical perspective. METHOD: In this commentary, I apply a feminist perspective to identify some of the assumptions that limit the ICF and to illustrate how the principles of feminist science could enhance the ICF. RESULTS: The analysis reveals that although the ICF is premised on the assumptions of biopsychosocial theory (BPS), there are aspects of the classification that contradict the tenets of BPS. Moreover, although the ICF is purported to represent a change in thinking about disability, the stated principles of rehabilitation medicine have the potential to limit the ICF in this regard. CONCLUSION: The ICF has the potential to be a powerful tool for changing the way that we think about disability and to improve the lives of individuals of all abilities. Bringing the ICF into closer alignment with BPS theory is an important step in moving the ICF forward.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".