Non-disabled persons' attitude towards the physically disabled as a function of educational level and contact

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to describe and compare the expressed attitudes of non-disabled persons' toward the physically disabled as a function of educational level and contact. Attitudes were measured by the Attitudes Toward Disabled Persons scale (ATDP). Specifically, a comparison was made between ATDP scores of students who had experienced previous contact with physically disabled persons and students who had not, in each of three educational levels: junior high (grade seven), senior high (grade eleven), and second-year university. -- Data from 273 junior high school, 268 senior high school, and 155 second-year university students were subjected to analysis of variance and Sheffé tests with the null hypotheses rejected at the 0.05 level of confidence. -- Findings indicated that both educational level and contact were related to the attitudes of non-disabled subjects toward disabled subjects, and that there was an interaction between these two variables. -- Generally, subjects in the contact group for each successive educational level tended to be more positive in their expressed attitudes toward disabled persons than subjects in the no-contact group. In the no-contact group, however, there was no difference in attitudes toward disabled persons between the grade seven and university students, or between the grade eleven and university students, and for grade eleven students there was no difference between the contact and no-contact groups. Findings also indicated that there was no difference in attitudes toward disabled persons between grade eleven and university students. Thus, the interaction between educational level and contact did not appear to be linear.