Essay About Stigma

Chapter 2

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

In this chapter, a compilation of associated topics from books, articles, and other studies is presented in a topic approach wherein the gathered extracts from other related works are grouped according to individual topics that would later lead to the specific topic of the study. This research has focused on nature of the stigma, and the second is the way that parents have experienced and coped with it.

Literature

Stigma

This was the study by Dr. David E. Gray, entitled Perceptions of stigma: the parents of autistic children. He stated that Stigma, as a sociological concept, was developed by Goffman (1963) and has been applied to a wide range of adult illness experiences (Becker 1981, Bury1988, Hopper1981,

Falk defines existential stigma "as stigma deriving from a condition which the target of the stigma either did not cause or over which he has little control." He defines Achieved Stigma as "stigma that is earned because of conduct and/or because they contributed heavily to attaining the stigma in question.

Bruce Link and Jo Phelan propose that stigma exists when four specific components converge, first was Individuals differentiate and label human variations. The second one is Prevailing cultural beliefs tie those labeled to adverse attributes, the third one is Labeled individuals are placed in distinguished groups that serve to establish a sense of disconnection between "us" and "them" and the last is Labeled individuals experience "status loss and discrimination" that leads to unequal circumstances.

Stigma is a mark separating individuals from one another based on a socially conferred judgment that some persons or groups are tainted and “less than.” Stigma often leads to negative beliefs (i.e., stereotypes), the endorsement of those negative stereotypes as real (i.e., prejudice), and a desire to avoid or exclude persons who hold stigmatized statuses (i.e., discrimination, Corrigan, Markowitz, Watson, Rowan, & Kubiak, 2003;Link & Phelan,