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the specificity and the asset value of interdisciplinary work (Telfener 2011) despite litera-
ture showing how the physicians' and social workers' identities are better defined than the
psychologists'. In fact, the psychologist's professional identity tends to follow the physician
or social worker's model depending on the context (Grasso 2001), as has been highlighted
in a recent study (Cordella et al. 2011) carried out by the Dynamic and Clinical Psychology
Department of the Medicine and Psychology Faculty at Sapienza University in Rome.
8.7.1 Professionals' representation of Disability
Research has been performed in an Italian vision rehabilitation center that serves the cen-
tral and southern areas of the country and has worked in the field for almost one and a
half centuries. It provides many services, including rehabilitation for blind and visually
impaired people of all ages, with a multidisciplinary approach carried out by a variety of
professional figures making up the team. The aim of the study was to explore profession-
als' identity by using their narrations (Freda 2009) of their professional experiences in the
rehabilitation of people with visual disability.
Interviews were integrally audiotaped, transcribed, and underwent a text analysis per-
formed with a computer software package, T-Lab (Lancia 2004). T-lab performed a cor-
respondence analysis and a cluster analysis to identify groups of lemmas having high
variances within and between clusters. This analysis allows for the identification of reveal-
ing words that characterize the way professionals represent their professional function,
their impaired patients, and the rehabilitation process.
The results show four different clusters characterizing professionals' accounts that reflect
the richness of professionals' skills and experiences. They highlight the professionals' abil-
ity to deal with a large variety of problems connected with disability. Management, pre-
vention, training, and advocacy seem to be the goals of the rehabilitation process carried
out by the interaction of the multidisciplinary team. Moreover, professionals working at
the vision rehabilitation center represented four groups: physicians, paramedics, psycho-
social workers, and vision rehabilitation professionals (Table 8.2), and the cluster distribu-
tion in each group was ascertained to explore how it characterizes each group (Figure 8.2).
TABLe 8.2
Profession Groups
GROUP
N°
PROFESSION
N°
A: PHYSICIANS
6
Neuropsychiatrist
4
Ophthalmologist
1
Psychiatrist
1
B: PARAMEDICS
12
Logotherapists
2
Music therapist
1
Nurses
2
Occupational therapist
1
Optometrists
2
Physiotherapist
1
Psychomotricity therapists
3
C: PSYCHOSOCIAL WORKERS
3
Psychologists
2
Social worker
1
D: VISION REHABILITATION
PROFESSIONALS
13
Typhlo-therapists
13
