Raising Children with Disabilities: A Critical Understanding of the Lived Experiences of Chinese Immigrant Parents in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People with disabilities are widely disadvantaged and often excluded from participating fully in society and its major institutions. Negative societal attitudes towards disabilities as well as restrictive social policies and practices frequently lead people with disabilities, as well as their families, to experience stigma and social isolation. Little is known about the experiences of immigrant parents raising children with disabilities, whose marginalization may be compounded by the additional challenges faced in the process of transition and adapting to a new country and culture. Through the examination of lived experiences of first-generation Chinese immigrant parents raising children with disabilities in Calgary, Canada, this qualitative study provides a deeper understanding of the complexity of the immigrant disability experience and how it is related to the ways in which dominant political ideologies and related policies and practices respond to and manage disability. Using hermeneutic phenomenology and in-depth interviews with 11 Chinese immigrant parents, I explore meaning- and decision-making as these parents navigate the social processes and structures of assessment, diagnosis, intervention, and service provision for their children. Employing a critical social theory lens in my analysis, I unpack the question, “how does dominant neoliberal ideology and a medically-informed view of disability systemically influence the lives of Chinese immigrant parents raising children with disabilities?” The phenomenological experience of being a Chinese immigrant parent to children with disabilities manifests itself through the themes of transformation, capacity for choice, and hope. In essence, becoming a parent to a child with a disability is a transformative experience that has significant impacts on the choices that parents are subsequently forced to make and the hopes they have for what will become of their children. Critical analysis further reveals that structural processes exclude parents from acquiring knowledge and power regarding how diagnoses are performed and how access to services is negotiated. Silently and invisibly, Chinese immigrant parents are wilfully assimilated into a new language and culture of understanding and responding to disability, and subsequently of understanding their children. Findings from this interpretive investigation offer insights into the struggles and sacrifices that Chinese immigrant parents raising children with disabilities experience and provides suggestions for more inclusive future directions.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".