Social Role Valorization Theory

Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger and his idea of Social Role Valorization (SRV) has helped make a tremendous amount of positive change in the world of disabilities. Although it is a continuing fight in terms of how society views people with disabilities, Wolfensberger 's theory of SRV is helping to change the landscape of how society views people who are considered to be "not normal." To many, it is unknown how to help people who are often left behind and deemed "devalued." The main goal of people like Wolfensberger is to bring to light the role society plays in devaluing people and ways to combat it. Through Wolfensberger 's countless hours of analysis and research, his ideas bring forth ways to help people who do not receive the "good things in

One point of social devaluation that is imperative to understand is exactly who the groups of people being oppressed are and who is doing the oppressing. Usually, people who are more well off in society are devaluing those who are not; one way to think about this idea is thinking in terms of people who are rich and people who are poor. Throughout history, rich people have often discriminated against and devalued people who were poor and did not have many valuables; these people were often times deemed useless and unimportant to society. Wolfensberger makes a point to mention that social devaluation comes in a couple of different forms; the two biggest forms of social devaluation come in forms of devaluing individuals or devaluing entire groups of people. With this in mind, Wolfensberger says that the latter form of devaluation is the one that makes the biggest impact because of how it creates different kinds of levels of social classes who are treated poorly in different ways (Wolfensberger, 2005,

Model Coherency Model coherency is one of the ten themes of Wolfensberger 's theory of SRV. Although model coherency is often associated with the term inclusion, they are not actually the same thing. It is important to understand that inclusion is just one of the ideas that helped Wolfensberger spring towards creating his idea of model coherency (Flynn & Lemay, 1999, p, 71.) Model coherency is a type of human service model that aims to treat every individual as unique. According to Wolfensberger, "The ideal service mode,- i.e., the one with the greatest model coherency- would be derived from the real, primary, and urgent needs of the people to be served, and all of its process components would match harmoniously with each other and the content so as to facilitate effective address of those needs" (Wolfensberger, 2013, p. 144.) This is exactly what model coherency aims to do. Model coherency helps us understand if the services being provided to a devalued person are actually meeting the specific persons needs (Oak, n.d.) One of the most important components of model coherency is to make sure that what the model is trying to accomplish with an individual appeal and to the person who is devalued. To do this, culturally valued analogues are