A hierarchy of reactions to disability.

The responses of 118 individuals with non-congenital physical disabilities to the 60-item Reactions to Impairment and Disability Inventory (RIDI) were submitted to an ordering-theoretic data analysis procedure. The RIDI provides information on eight patterns of psychosocial reactions to disability, namely: shock, anxiety, denial, depression, internalized anger, externalized hostility, acknowledgement and adjustment. The resultant nonlinear multidimensional hierarchy of contingent relationships among the eight scales was interpreted with reference to the clinical literature and to previous investigations designed to validate the existence of patterns of reactions to disability (e.g. Livneh and Antonak, 1990). It is recommended that subsequent research should compare hierarchies derived from data obtained from other, more homogeneous samples to clarify the multidimensional, nonlinear structure of the process of adaptation to disability.