This book is the product of a forum titled New Research Directions and Paradigms, held at the Congress of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency in Australia in August 1992. The book presents 13 chapters, all written within a critical paradigm for disability research which critiques the reification of disability entrenched through a positivist theory of knowledge and focuses on the social, economic, political, and legal construction of disability. This paradigm sees disability as socially constructed rather than an inherent and fixed feature of a person and examines disability research questions through the lens of human rights and ethics. The following chapters are included: (1) "New Research Directions and Paradigms: Disability Is Not Measles" (Marcia H. Rioux); (2) "Intellectual Disability and the Heritage of Modernity" (John P. Radford); (3) "What Matters Most: Disability, Research and Empowerment" (Linda Ward and Margaret Flynn); (4) "Towards Inclusion: The Role of People with Disabilities in Policy and Research Issues in the United States--A Historical and Political Analysis" (Irving Kenneth Zola); (5) "Towards a Concept of Equality of Well-Being: Overcoming the Social and Legal Construction of Inequality" (Marcia H. Rioux); (6) "Voluntary Disabilities and Everyday Illnesses" (Jerome E. Bickenbach); (7) "Quality of Life: Questioning the Vantage Points for Research" (Michael Bach); (8) "Naming and Renaming Persons with Intellectual Disabilities" (Fred E. Stockholder); (9) "Knowing about Knowing: Margin Notes on Disability Research" (Aileen Wight Felske); (10) "The Social Semiotics of Disability" (Gary Woodill); (11) "Setting One Agenda for Empowering Persons with a Disadvantage within the Research Process" (Paul Ramcharan and Gordon Grant); (12) "Theoretical Framework for What Persons with Severe and Profound Multiple Intellectual Disabilities Do in Context" (John J. Gleason); and (13) "The Politics of Care-Giving" (Robyn Munford). Most chapters contain reference notes. (DB)