Problematizing Transition to Adulthood for Young Disabled People
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this critical qualitative study was to understand how transition to adulthood for young people with developmental disabilities (DD) is constituted as a ‘problem’ in policies and practices across sectors in Ontario and the implications for these young people and their parents. This transition to adulthood has been identified as a policy problem in three provincial government sectors in Ontario, Canada—rehabilitation, education, and developmental services. The problem is predominantly framed as a service transition issue, particularly when young people ‘age out’ of pediatric health services by age 19 and public education by age 21, and seek adult-oriented programs and services. Transition policies have been developed in each sector, shaped by both explicit and implicit understandings of key concepts, such as disability and adulthood. These understandings function to constitute transition as a particular kind of problem, and play a key role in what is considered and proposed to address it, but also what is not considered or potentially neglected or even ignored. What is and is not considered has implications for the health and daily lives of young disabled people and their families. Guided by a problem-questioning approach to policy analysis proposed by Carol Bacchi, I used a multimethod design, including analysis of three policy documents and in-depth interviews with 13 parents, to examine how transition to adulthood is constituted as a problem. My analysis revealed that normative assumptions about ways of being, becoming, and acting as an adult shaped an implied problem of disabled children and their inadequate progression to socially valued adult roles and activities. Policies shaped by these assumptions had both positive (e.g., feelings of self-worth for achieving or approximating socially valued roles and activities) and unintended negative effects (e.g., social exclusion, stress or anxiety when adult roles were not achieved) on young disabled people and their parents. These findings highlight opportunities for rethinking the policy problem in ways that can mitigate unintended harmful consequences on young people with DD and their families and for improving their health and daily life circumstances through healthy public policy and cross-sector coordination.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".