In the past quarter of a century, several attempts have been made to categorize the different sources of negative attitudes toward individuals with disabling conditions. This chapter integrates the major approaches in the domain of attitudinal sources toward people with disabilities and offers a new classification system by which these attitudes can be better conceptualized and understood. Some of the major categories included are: (a) conditioning by sociocultural norms that emphasize certain qualities not met by the disabled population; (b) childhood influences in which early life experiences foster the formation of stereotypic adult beliefs and values; and (c) psychodynamic mechanisms that may play a role in creating unrealistic expectations and unresolved conflicts when interacting with disabled persons. Parental and significant others’ actions, words, tone of voice, gestures, and so forth, are transmitted to the child and tend to have a crucial impact on the formation of attitudes toward disability.

The concept of quality of life (QOL), as a psychosocial construct, process, measure, goal, and outcome, has gained much popularity in the rehabilitation literature during the past 35 years. As both a goal (i.e., assisting clients with chronic illnesses and disabilities (CIDs) to attain a better QOL) and a process-outcome indicator (i.e., assessing both subjective and objective levels of QOL during and following rehabilitation interventions), QOL has become one of the most prominent and central concepts in the field of rehabilitation. This chapter familiarizes the reader with the conceptual and temporal parallelism underlying the domains of community interventions and personal coping, of which rehabilitation services are an essential component, as part of their joint goal to improve QOL. It provides examples from the field of psychosocial rehabilitation, and more specific coping with CID, that address the temporal nature of QOL-improving coping strategies.

This chapter provides the reader with an overview of (a) the dynamics (i.e., process) of psychosocial adaptation to chronic illness and disabilities (CID), (b) methods commonly used to assess psychosocial adaptation to CID, and (c) intervention strategies applied to people with CID. The chapter groups the psychosocial adaptation to CID under three headings: basic concepts such as stress, loss and grief, and quality of life, CID-triggered reactions, and CID-related coping strategies. The literature on CID-related coping strategies is vast. The chapter describes only a cursory overview of the most commonly reported strategies, directly related to coping with CID. It first briefly discusses the concept of coping and illustrates its relevance to CID. Over the past half century, a large number of measures of psychosocial adaptation to and coping with CID have been reported in the literature. The chapter reviews only those psychometrically sound measures most frequently reported in the literature.