Social Well-Being of Students with Disabilities in Metropolis

Abstract

The study of problems of people with disabilities lies in an interdisciplinary field, where medicine and physiology come into contact with legal, urban, sociocultural aspects of life, allowing us to consider disability issues from a new scientific perspective. The aim of our research is to study the social well-being of students with disabilities in the context of inclusiveness of urban space. The article presents the results of the research conducted by the authors of the article in 2023 by a focus group method at a metropolitan inclusive university in Moscow. The research methodology is built within the framework of the sociology of disability and social urbanism. The study sample (n = 40) consisted of students with musculoskeletal disabilities who came from medium-sized and small cities of Russia to receive higher education.

The study made it possible to identify the levels of social well-being of students with disabilities (high, medium and low) and to correlate them with the degree of their socio-psychological safety (maximum, moderate and minimal). It has been empirically proven that Russian cities, depending on their size (metropolises, large, medium and small), have a significant impact on the social well-being of students with disabilities, which is due, firstly, to different degrees of inclusiveness of the space; secondly, the different attitudes of city dwellers towards young disabled people (positive, neutral, negative).