by Author Doug Bott

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Youth Orchestras for disabled people - consultation findings

An attempt to summarise the 'semantic minefield' thrown up by the recent MUSE Project consultation.

Many thanks to all who took part in our recent consultation on naming youth orchestras for disabled people, in response to my previous blog post. Thanks also to everyone who emailed with their thoughts, and who posted comments.

We haven't yet decided on a new name, but in the meantime we're using 'Accessible Youth Orchestras' as a working title until a final decision is made. The consultation findings are far from clear-cut, but they are fascinating and really useful. We received 57 responses to the consulation, which isn't bad for a small social enterprise with limited time to promote such things, especially given the demands of preparing for our forthcoming concert at the Colston Hall, Bristol on 14th July. Click the image below for details:

We're particularly pleased that nearly half the respondents (47%) identify as disabled. If the consultation findings indicate anything, it is (arguably) that on the evidence of this consultation, language which is deemed acceptable by the theory of the social model of disability doesn't seem to have caught on in reality, and that disabled respondents seem just as concerned about the potential stigma of the word 'disabled' as are non-disabled respondents.

We're not sharing the complete findings at this stage, (29th Sept 2014 update: complete findings now published at http://bit.ly/1pgqK9t ) but below are a series of word-clouds showing responses to three key questions from which you can draw your own conclusions. (Apologies to anyone using a screen reader – the wordclouds were created using a Java applet that I hoped would be accessible to screen readers, but I can’t find a way to embed these here on the Youth Music Blog. Instead I'm using images of the word-clouds with the most prominent words entered as 'alternative text'.) The response to each question is shown using three different word-clouds:

  1. Responses from all respondents
  2. Filtered to show only those responses from disabled respondents
  3. Filtered to show only those responses from non-disabled respondents
  In response to the question "Are there any words that you think we should consider using in the new name?" All respondents:

  Disabled respondents only:

  Non-disabled respondents only:

  In response to the question "Are there any words that you think we should AVOID using in the new name?" All respondents:

 

Disabled respondents only:

 

Non-disabled respondents only:

  In response to the question: "What do you think the new name for the Youth Orchestras should be?" All respondents:

 

Disabled respondents only:

 

Non-disabled respondents only: