IDENTITY AND THE SENSE OF SUBJECTIVITY IN PARENTS OF CHILDREN WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF FAMILY LIFE DESTABILIZATION

Abstract

The lives of families who take care of people with disabilities are full of unexpected events, unwanted situations, and difficulties that accumulate at every step. Therefore, bearing in mind the purpose of this paper, I focused on determining those conditions which are a source of destabilization in the lives of families with intellectually disabled children. I attemptto reconstruct the sources of threats to the sense of subjectivity and the shaping of the identity of parents who have children with disabilities. The theoretical framework of the analysis is symbolic interactionism. The research material used in the presented article is composed of personal experiences of parents of disabled individuals, and unstructured interviews were performed with these people. Analysis of the research material was performed in accordance with the procedures of grounded theory methodology

Keywords

• family
• disability
• identity
• subjectivity
• life destabilization