Search

The internet has become very central to today’s society. The aim of this scoping review was to map internet use among people with an intellectual disability (ID) in Sweden, and to scrutinise the phenomenon from a critical perspective. The concepts of digital divide, digital inequality, social construction of intellectual disability, and power relations were applied to conceptualise the empirical material. The results showed that people with ID have limited access to the internet. A discrepancy in approaches towards internet use was identified. Generally, people with ID subscribe to a positive view of the internet. Among professionals a generally pessimistic view was instead identified. People with ID are described as a vulnerable and naive group, who presumably cannot protect themselves from the risks the internet entails. From a critical perspective, control of internet access could strengthen asymmetric power, and human rights of social participation are withheld from people with ID.

This article focuses on the stock of accommodation service units for people with psychiatric disabilities in Sweden and the classification of supported accommodation. We examined 122 units in 12 municipalities in Sweden and classified them according to the Simple Taxonomy for Supported Accommodation (STAX-SA). We found an obvious variation in the field and a movement into a recovery-oriented direction and towards individuality. There is an emphasis on Move-On that seems to expand into and beyond floating outreach support, and there is a relaxation of service units’ boundaries concerning commitment and target groups. The correspondence to STAX-SA was quite low (48%), and the applicability to ‘real world’ services was not satisfactory. When capturing variation and change in a rich dataset, STAX-SA is too reductive. However, STAX-SA was a successful point of departure in the analysis that opened up for identifying diversities and movement. We suggest some adjustments to increase its applicability.