MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE: RELATIONAL AUTONOMY AND DECISION-MAKING BY ADULTS WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canadian law, the concept of autonomy is individualistic in nature, manifest as the capacity, or legal ability of an individual to actively understand the purpose and consequences of their actions according to whether they have faculties to comprehend and weigh risks and benefits. Feminist scholars critique such conceptualizations of autonomy and, instead, argue the importance of “relational autonomy” which is predicated on the view that actions result from one’s own volition in combination with the influence of one’s social and relational connections. In this paper, we examine the dynamics and implications of relational autonomy in decision-making by adults with developmental disabilities by studying adults with developmental disabilities in interaction with their caregiving family members. Our purpose is to contribute understandings of how and in what ways family caregiving relational contexts both support and hinder decision-making by adults with developmental disabilities. We begin with an overview of conceptualizations and applications of autonomy, then illustrate relational autonomy dynamics through comparative analysis of data from two women with developmental disabilities who were interviewed together with their family caregivers about successes and struggles in giving and receiving care and making decisions. These two women, and their family caregivers (N=9) are selected from a larger sample of adults with developmental disabilities and their family caregivers (N = 26) because the contrasts, as well as the similarities, between their family care situations are striking, and taken together, illustrate a range of ways in which decision-making is supported and hindered. We conclude by upholding the importance of relational autonomy for legal understandings of decision-making, yet we caution that critical examination of relationship dynamics is vital.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".