Translating and Transforming Care: People With Brain Injury and Caregivers Filling in a Disability Claim Form
Abstract
This article examines how the Disability Living Allowance claim form, used in the United Kingdom to allocate £13 billion of disability benefits, translates and transforms disability and care. Twenty-two people with acquired brain injury and their main informal caregivers (n = 44) were video-recorded filling in the disability claim form. Participants disagreed on 26% of the questions, revealing two types of problems. Translation problems arose as participants struggled to provide categorical responses to ambiguous questions and were unable to report contextual variability in care needs or divergences of perception. Transformation problems arose as participants resisted the way in which the form positioned them, forcing them to conceptualize their relationship in terms of dependency and burden. The disability claim form co-opts claimants to translate care and disability into bureaucratically predefined categories, and it transforms the care relationship that it purports to document.
References
Stress and coping among families of patients with traumatic brain injury: a review of the literature
Citations
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Brain Injury & Trauma
brain injury after impact to the head is due to both immediate mechanical effects and delayed responses of neural tissues.