Attitudes toward people with physical disabilities: An examination of social context, discipline, disability type, and demographics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Valentini Kalargyrou ◽  
William Pettinico ◽  
Po-Ju Chen

BACKGROUND: Despite the existence of studies examining attitudes toward people with disabilities (PWDs) in a workplace context, little is known about attitudes in other social contexts such as dating and marriage. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is threefold. First, the study seeks to examine how social context (i.e., work, dating, marriage) influences attitudes toward people with physical disabilities (PWPDs). Second, it examines potential influence of participant characteristics (i.e., gender, major, disability education, and frequency of contact). Third, it explores whether attitudes vary across different disability types. METHODS: To measure the influence of social context on attitudes toward PWPDs, the study used the Disability Social Relationship Scale (DSR), which was completed by 395 undergraduate students in Austria. RESULTS: Participants demonstrate more positive attitudes toward PWPDs in the workplace than in the social contexts of dating and marriage. Participants who had more frequent contact with PWDs (i.e., in a workplace/service setting or in a personal relationship) demonstrate more positive attitudes toward PWPDs. Participants have more positive attitudes toward some disability types (i.e., deafness/hardness of hearing) than others (blindness/visual impairment). CONCLUSION: We offer recommendations for future research and practice aimed at creating awareness of biases toward PWDs while promoting social justice.

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darcy Haag Granello ◽  
Joe E. Wheaton

Undergraduate students (n=128) in courses in the college of education at a large, Midwestern university completed two instruments designed to determine their attitudes toward people with physical disabilities and those with mental illnesses. Instruments were the Community Attitudes Toward the Mentally III (CAM!) and the Modified Issues in Disabilities Scale (MIDS). Results indicated that, overall, students held positive views toward persons with both types of disabilities. However, contrary to previous research, students held slightly more positive attitudes toward persons with mental illnesses than toward persons with physical disabilities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick A. R. Jones ◽  
Helen C. Spence-Jones ◽  
Mike Webster ◽  
Luke Rendell

Abstract Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been linked to consistent individual differences in behavioural traits, especially in situations which require engaging with novelty, but the social environment can also play an important role. The presence of others can modulate the effects of individual behavioural traits and afford access to social information that can reduce the need for ‘risky’ asocial learning. Most studies of social effects on learning are focused on more social species; however, such factors can be important even for less-social animals, including non-grouping or facultatively social species which may still derive benefit from social conditions. Using archerfish, Toxotes chatareus, which exhibit high levels of intra-specific competition and do not show a strong preference for grouping, we explored the effect of social contexts on learning. Individually housed fish were assayed in an ‘open-field’ test and then trained to criterion in a task where fish learnt to shoot a novel cue for a food reward—with a conspecific neighbour visible either during training, outside of training or never (full, partial or no visible presence). Time to learn to shoot the novel cue differed across individuals but not across social context. This suggests that social context does not have a strong effect on learning in this non-obligatory social species; instead, it further highlights the importance that inter-individual variation in behavioural traits can have on learning. Significance statement Some individuals learn faster than others. Many factors can affect an animal’s learning rate—for example, its behavioural phenotype may make it more or less likely to engage with novel objects. The social environment can play a big role too—affecting learning directly and modifying the effects of an individual’s traits. Effects of social context on learning mostly come from highly social species, but recent research has focused on less-social animals. Archerfish display high intra-specific competition, and our study suggests that social context has no strong effect on their learning to shoot novel objects for rewards. Our results may have some relevance for social enrichment and welfare of this increasingly studied species, suggesting there are no negative effects of short- to medium-term isolation of this species—at least with regards to behavioural performance and learning tasks.


Author(s):  
Alicja Mironiuk

The paper presents the results of a qualitative research on a topic of the film imagery of people with physical disabilities. Selected feature films were analysed on the basis of specific questions regarding femininity, masculinity and sexuality of persons with physical disabilities. Additionally, the research was also based on three imagery stages: the early-exploitation, the super-cripple and normality. The main result of the analysis is to settle two discourses: the main and the alternative. Despite the social changes, most popular representations are stereotypical, presenting disability as a total category and are shown from the masculine perspective. The most important presentation within the alternative discourse must include disability as a transparent, unseen difference.


1986 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pat M. Keith

A model of singleness in later life was developed to show how the social context may influence the personal and social resources of older, unmarried persons. The unmarried (especially the divorced) will be an increasing proportion of the aged population in the future, and they will require more services than will the married. Role transitions of the unmarried over the life course, finances, health, and social relationships of older singles are discussed with implications for practice and future research.


2020 ◽  
pp. 107780122095427
Author(s):  
Jessica A. Blayney ◽  
Tiffany Jenzer ◽  
Jennifer P. Read ◽  
Jennifer Livingston ◽  
Maria Testa ◽  
...  

Sexual victimization (SV) risk can begin in social contexts, ones where friends are present, though it is unclear how friends might be integrated into SV prevention. Using focus groups, female college drinkers described (a) the role of friends in preventing SV, (b) the strategies friends use to reduce vulnerability, and (c) the barriers to implementation. Friends-based strategies (keeping tabs on one another, using signals to convey potential danger, interrupting escalating situations, taking responsibility for friends, relying on male friends) and barriers (intoxication, preoccupation, situation ambiguity, social consequences) were discussed. Interventions can draw on these strategies, but must address the critical barriers.


One aspect of profiling to enhance teaching and learning involves the various contexts in which learners will engage, such as particular social media ecosystems and their attendant microcultures (the social norms and common practices in these spaces), particularly if learners will be engaging with individuals outside of the formal classroom. Understanding the larger online social context helps define the affordances and constraints of what can be effectively taught and learned. This involves profiling the current user base of the online social spaces where the learners will be engaging and interacting and co-creating knowledge.


2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Frewen ◽  
David J. A. Dozois

Congruency theory predicts that sociotropic and autonomous individuals may experience negative life events differently, focusing primarily on the social and achievement themes of events, respectively. The present study investigated this hypothesis in 175 undergraduate students, who completed measures of sociotropy and autonomy, depressive symptoms, and life event self-worth impact appraisals. Both negative interpersonal and personal failure-related events were related to participants’ senses of self-worth in the social and achievement domains, supporting a continuous model of life event classification. Sociotropy and specific autonomy subfactors showed differential associations with self-worth impact ratings. Recommendations for future research, psychological assessment, and treatment of depressive responses to negative life events in sociotropic and autonomous individuals are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran ◽  
Owen Rambow

Understanding how the social context of an interaction affects our dialog behavior is of great interest to social scientists who study human behavior, as well as to computer scientists who build automatic methods to infer those social contexts. In this paper, we study the interaction of power, gender, and dialog behavior in organizational interactions. In order to perform this study, we first construct the Gender Identified Enron Corpus of emails, in which we semi-automatically assign the gender of around 23,000 individuals who authored around 97,000 email messages in the Enron corpus. This corpus, which is made freely available, is orders of magnitude larger than previously existing gender identified corpora in the email domain. Next, we use this corpus to perform a largescale data-oriented study of the interplay of gender and manifestations of power. We argue that, in addition to one’s own gender, the “gender environment” of an interaction, i.e., the gender makeup of one’s interlocutors, also affects the way power is manifested in dialog. We focus especially on manifestations of power in the dialog structure — both, in a shallow sense that disregards the textual content of messages (e.g., how often do the participants contribute, how often do they get replies etc.), as well as the structure that is expressed within the textual content (e.g., who issues requests and how are they made, whose requests get responses etc.). We find that both gender and gender environment affect the ways power is manifested in dialog, resulting in patterns that reveal the underlying factors. Finally, we show the utility of gender information in the problem of automatically predicting the direction of power between pairs of participants in email interactions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatriz Martín-Luengo ◽  
Karlos Luna ◽  
Yury Shtyrov

Conversational pragmatics studies, among others, factors that affect the information we share with others. Previous research showed that when participants are unsure about the correctness of an answer, they report fewer answers. This behavior strongly depends on the incentive structure of the social context where the question-response exchange takes place. In this research we studied how the different incentive structure of several types of social contexts affects conversational pragmatics and the amount of information we are willing to share. In addition, we also studied how different levels of knowledge may affect memory reporting in different social contexts. Participants answered easy, intermediate, and difficult general knowledge questions and decided whether they would report or withhold their selected answer in different social contexts: formal vs. informal, and constrained (a context that promotes providing only responses we are certain about) vs. loose (with an incentive structure that maximizes providing any type of answer). Overall, our results confirmed that social contexts are associated with a different incentive structure which affect memory reporting strategies, and that the effect of social contexts depended on the difficulty of the questions. Our results highlight the relevance of studying the different incentive structures of social contexts to understand the underlying processes of conversational pragmatics, and stress the importance of considering metamemory theories of memory reporting.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 160
Author(s):  
Raghad Y. Alkhudair

This paper aims to determine the usefulness and functions of code-switching in the classroom when used by both lecturers and students. The study was conducted at a Saudi university campus and follows a quantitative approach using sets of questionnaires to collect the data. Then, the data were analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). Based on the analysis, the given study shows that professors and students consider code-switching from English into Arabic in the classroom as a beneficial instrument in enhancing the learning process. That is because it allows otherwise insurmountable problems for two-way communication in the L2 target language (English) to be overcome. Also, the findings of the current study reveal a range of positive attitudes toward using code-switching in two ways, Saudi-English immersion classrooms. Specifically, the majority of the professors use this technique in certain situations to achieve a better understanding by the students. In the same vein, students in this study show huge acceptance and prove how such a phenomenon has worked as a learning facilitator. It is hoped that the results of this study will be useful for professors and researchers investigating the importance of code-switching in the classroom.


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