Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Disability Rights Movement and Advocacy Organizations

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the rise of the disability rights movement with particular focus on the expansion of disability advocacy organizations. Disability rights have had a late start in advocacy and protest despite earlier legislative gains like the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Accounts of the disability rights movement suggest that although the movement might share similarly structured rights activities with other minority rights movements, there are also important differences which shed light on the ability of social movement and organizational theories to explain the expansion of disability advocacy. The analyses in my dissertation are all longitudinal and use event-history analysis, as well as logistic and Poisson regression models. The main data is an original longitudinal (1961-2006) dataset of disability organizations. There are two broader impacts of this project. First, competition and innovation in the nonprofit service sector can give rise to more advocacy-oriented organizations. Second, this project seeks to answer important questions about the success of social movement organizations. This dissertation explains the ways in which disability organizations, particularly in their shift towards advocacy, continued to survive, and whether this change has led to success, real or perceived.