It involves the normal conditions of life – housing, schooling, employment, exercise, recreation and freedom of choice previously denied to individuals with severe, profound, or significant disabilities.
Wolfensberger is credited with authoring the first textbook and Rutherford H. (Rud) Turnbull III reports that integration principles are incorporated in US laws.
[12] Normalization has had a significant effect on the way services for people with disabilities have been structured throughout the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, North America, Israel, Australasia (e.g., New Zealand), and, increasingly, other parts of the world.
The New York State Quality of Care Commission also recommended education based upon principles of normalization and social role valorization addressing "deep-seated negative beliefs of and about people with disabilities".
[17][18] Its roots are European-American, and as discussed in education fields in the 1990s, reflect a traditional gender relationship-position (Racino, 2000), among similar diversity critiques of the period (i.e., multiculturalism).
[20][21][22][23] In the United States, large public institutions housing adults with developmental disabilities began to be phased out as a primary means of delivering services in the early 1970s and the statistics have been documented until the present day (2015) by David Braddock and his colleagues.
[24] As early as the late 1960s, the normalization principle was described to change the pattern of residential services, as exposes occurred in the US and reform initiatives began in Europe.
These proposed changes were described in the leading text by the President's Committee on Mental Retardation (PCMR) titled: "Changing Patterns in Residential Services for the Mentally Retarded" with leaders Burton Blatt, Wolf Wolfensberger, Bengt Nirje, Bank-Mikkelson, Jack Tizard, Seymour Sarason, Gunnar Dybwad, Karl Gruenwald, Robert Kugel, and lesser known colleagues Earl Butterfield, Robert E. Cooke, David Norris, H. Michael Klaber, and Lloyd Dunn.
[25] The impetus for this mass deinstitutionalization was typically complaints of systematic abuse of the patients by staff and others responsible for the care and treatment of this traditionally vulnerable population with media and political exposes and hearings.
In part, the word "normal" continues to be used in contrast to "abnormal", a term also for differentness or out of the norm or accepted routine (e.g., middle class).
Their opportunities for a full productive life were minimal at best and often emphasis was placed more on personal characteristics that could be enhanced so the attention was taken away from their disability.
In the article The Mountain written by Eli Clare, Michael Oliver defines impairment as lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body and the societal construct of disability; Oliver defines disability as the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no or little account of people who have physical (and/or cognitive/developmental/mental) impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of society.
[37] However, the perspective of Wolfensberger, who served as associated faculty with the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Community Integration (despite concerns of federal funds), is that people he has known in institutions have "suffered deep wounds".
[41] In particular, this may be because Racino (with Taylor) leads an international field on community integration, a neighboring related concept to the principle of normalization, and was pleased to have Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger among Center Associates.
[45] Arguments about choice and individuality, in connection with normalization, should also take into account whether society, perhaps through paid support staff, has encouraged them into certain behaviours.
However, the principle of normalization is intended also to refer to the means by which a person is supported, so that (in this example) any encouragement or discouragement offered in a patronising or directive manner is itself seen to be inappropriate.