Coupling constraints affecting daily mobilities of Swedish families with wheelchair-using children: L'impact des contraintes de couplage sur la mobilité quotidienne des familles suédoises avec des enfants en fauteuil roulant.

Mobility can involve many barriers that make it challenging for individuals with disabilities to travel. When it is a child who has a disability, the whole family's mobility practices can be affected by those barriers since families' mobilities are often intertwined. This paper is based on time-use diaries and interviews with parents of wheelchair-using children living in Sweden. A time-geographical framework is used in the paper, especially focusing on the concept of coupling constraints, which can emerge when individuals need to be together to perform an activity, such as mobility. The main focus is on how coupling constraints between parents and the disabled child affect mobilities, but the findings show that couplings also exist with authorities and things and these can increase coupling constraints within the family. However, if being eligible for personal assistance and special transport service the coupling constraints within the family can decrease, indicating that such support systems are fundamental for these families' mobilities. This paper also shows that time geography can be useful for disability studies and add new dimensions to the relational perspective on disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]