Is Autism a Disability? The Perception of Autistic Adults in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autism has long been viewed as a disorder characterized by persistent deficits in need of a cure. This medical or pathologizing perspective has been confronted by a social model of disability, which places the burden of the challenges faced by the autistic community on society's failure to accommodate neurological differences. A more nuanced, interactionist model suggests that disability arises from a poor fit between personal characteristics and environmental demands. As part of a mixed-method study on terminology pertaining to autism and related concepts, 14 French-speaking autistic adults from Quebec participated in semistructured interviews. They were asked their definitions of autism, the concept of disability, and whether autism is a disability. Qualitative analyses revealed that respondents were prone to view autism through the lens of a social model of disability. Autism was defined as a neurological difference rather than a mental illness. Although many conceptualized disability as a personal limitation, they were reluctant to label their diagnosis of autism as a disability. The difficulties they face stem from “disabling situations” due to environments and social norms tailored to a neurotypical majority of people. This aligns with the neurodiversity movement, which advocates social change while also recognizing the support needs of autistic individuals.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".