Disability Is Often Excluded From Social-Personality Studies

A man with a limb difference stands as he presents data to his colleagues during a meeting.

Source: Jordan Nicholson / Disability:IN / Creative Commons Attribution-NoDeritivatives 4.0 International License

Coauthored by Jordan Rubin-McGregor, William Meese, Kathleen R. Bogart, Ian Moura, Payton Rule, and Kyle Anderson

The field of psychology aims to study people: how we think, act, and behave. Despite this ambitious claim, in recent years, psychologists have pointed out that psychology often studies the experiences of a subset of people—usually white, Western, well-educated people—more than other, more prevalent groups. We suspected that another common group was also being left out of psychological science: people with disabilities, who comprise 15 to 25 percent of the world population. In a new study, we examined the extent to which disability is covered in social and personality psychology research.

As the largest minority group in the United States, and a group anyone can join at any time, disability can and will affect all of us. Most people will experience situational, temporary, or permanent disability at some point in their lifetime, and nearly everyone has loved ones, coworkers, and community members who are disabled. Psychology research could help. Studying how people adapt to disability can help us build stronger mental health and social supports; identifying and removing social and structural barriers can enable people with disabilities to fully participate in society.

Who are we?

Founded in 2021 by a Community Catalyst Grant from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Disability Advocacy and Research Network (DARN) is a volunteer-led collaborative for folks in psychology who have disabilities and their allies. As the Research Subgroup of DARN, we conduct research on important issues related to disability and psychological science.

We examined whether and how disability is considered in our field

Our first collaborative research goal was to investigate the degree to which disability-related research appears in the highest-impact publications in social and personality psychology. This subfield is focused on stereotyping, prejudice, identity, the self, and more—all of which are closely interwoven with the experience of disability.

Working together, 19 co-authors across 14 institutions planned, preregistered, and conducted a state-of-the-art review, examining the current state of disability representation in social and personality psychology. We focused on two specific questions:

1. How frequently do published manuscripts include disability-related concepts anywhere in the manuscript?
2. How do authors use disability-related concepts in their work?

We inspected all full-text manuscripts published between 2017 and 2022 in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which are preeminent journals in this field. We searched for 47 disability-related terms collaboratively assembled by a subset of our authorship team. After flagging each occurrence of disability-related terms, our team categorized each to describe how it was used.

Our findings were disappointing. Merely 192 of the 2,343 (8.2 percent) published manuscripts reviewed by our team mentioned disability in any way. Of those using any disability-related term, 155 articles (6.6 percent) used just a single term, often just once, in passing. Notably, even though social psychology is well-known for spearheading research on various prejudices, only one article in the entire six-year span referenced ableism, the term specifically used to describe prejudice against disabled people.

Equally disappointing was how authors used disability-related concepts: Disability terms tended to be used peripherally, such as exclusion criteria or a manipulation to imply incompetence or burden, and rarely in a social model context. Most strikingly, only three out of 2,343 articles—just 0.13 percent—treated disability as a core research focus. This is a dramatic oversight.

The costs of excluding disability

Disability is a common, normal, and valuable form of human diversity. When researchers exclude disabled people from studies, fail to report disability status within sample descriptives, or assume they are vulnerable or less capable of informed consent, they reduce the generalizability of their work. These practices reinforce longstanding assumptions that disability is a niche issue in psychology not worthy of mainstream research. Even worse, when mentions of disability in research come in the form of inaccurate stereotypes that suggest incompetence, it contributes to harmful and stigmatizing perceptions of disability and disabled people, as we point out in our paper.

Bias Essential Reads

Beyond the Visible-Invisible Disability Binary

The Virtual Body That Made Bias Worse

While our analysis focused on the subdiscipline of social and personality psychology, disability research may be poorly represented in other subfields as well, yet there has been little systematic examination. We urge other subfields to examine these questions as well.

Recommendations for inclusive psychological science

• Increase disability-focused research. Disability is relevant to all aspects of social life, and social and personality psychology can develop new knowledge by studying unique aspects of disability like ableism, identity development, adaptation, interdependence, and pride.
• Adopt strengths-based, disability affirming frameworks. Recognize that disabilities are often socially constructed and can reflect deficits within social environments, rather than a tragic deficit within disabled people. This framing illuminates social and structural barriers that can be addressed, as well as coping strategies such as creativity and collective action.
• Measure disability as a demographic variable. Studies routinely report the gender and racial make-up of study participants to understand its demographic representativeness. Yet only a fraction of a percent of studies reported how many people with disabilities were in their study. Researchers and advocates working within disability studies and policy have emphasized the importance of collecting disability data alongside other demographic information in national surveys. Our findings demonstrate the need for parallel efforts within social and personality psychology research.
• Include disabled researchers. Disabled researchers appear to be underrepresented as well: In 2020, only 4 percent of Society for Personality and Social Psychology members reported a disability. Researchers with lived experience of disability have unique insights and perspectives that will advance validity and generalizability of research.

Meaningful engagement with disability is not just an important part of increasing inclusivity; it’s a critical aspect of conducting rigorous, generalizable research. If social and personality psychology aims to understand human social life, it must recognize disability as part of the human condition that it claims to explain.

Jordan Rubin-McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at California State University Northridge. Will Meese is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston College. Ian Moura is a Senior Research Associate at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy. Payton Rule is a Clinical Psychology PhD Candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. Kyle Anderson is a PhD scholar and research consultant. All are members of DARN.