It's all hollow words or 'real' change? The impact of policies on the lives of young disabled people
Abstract
The ESF/GACR -funded project Quali-TYDES' (Qualitative Tracking with Young Disabled People in European) purpose is to investigate and explain how new developments in global, European, national and local policies are impacting on the lives of young disabled people in Austria, Czech Republic, Ireland and Spain. By combining qualitative methods with critical policy analysis, we aim to generate policy relevant knowledge that is grounded in the experiences of young disabled persons: In every participating country, 20 life stories of young disabled people will be compiled and analysed jointly.
The life stories will be 'updated' every year over the remaining project period in order to see if recent policies do impact on the real lives of disabled people. So this study aims on providing real life case studies of the barriers and opportunities created by national and local policy frameworks that can both complement and contest parallel quantitative data in order to monitor policies.In our paper, we will present results from our first phase of field work.
Furthermore, we will discuss how our methodological approach can support the monitoring of recent crucial policies in the field of disability and human rights, such as the Convention of the rights of people with disabilities or the European Disability Strategy 2010-2020.