RESEARCH ON DISABILITY IN SOCIOLOGY
The article suggests that considering the problem of disability, sociology points to two key paradigms - medical, formed by biomedical and traditional approaches, and social, where an innovative, post-traditional concept of disability is promoted. The traditional paradigm is linked to the understanding of disability by foreign researchers in the context of the functionalist approach of T. Parsons and his followers, symbolic interactionism, including the theory of Hoffman's stigmatization, the traditional medical approach taken by the World Health Organization from the 1980s until 2001. An innovative, social approach to disability in foreign sociology is expressed in the theory of individual adaptation, the socio-environmental model, the model of social constructivism, the materialistic-evolutionary approach and the paradigm of emancipative research. An analysis of the works of Russian authors made it possible to highlight additionally such models as the legal model, the model of cultural pluralism and the socio-cultural model, the concept of extrability. The article presents the conclusions of modern authors that a full implementation of the social approach to understanding disability in Russia is impossible due to the actual social, legal and cultural traditions, as well as the emerging model of civic participation in Western countries in opposition to the omnipresent concept of social security. Thus, the sociological analysis that presents the evolutionary context of foreign theoretical and methodological approaches to the essence of disability and their reflection in Russian research depicts a general understanding of the content of this problem in sociology.