Our Attitudes Towards Persons with Disability

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Several of the prevailing cultural values about disability are themselves disabling. A person with disability is presented to us as a personal tragedy or impaired body. In general terms, disability is constructed as an individual misfortune.  Disabling values contributes to oppression. People who have a negative attitude towards the disabled may have an impact on the disabled people’s experience and identity. Such negative attitudes or values may also be shared by groups of people who have great deal of power over persons with disability such as a team in service provider or a group of policy makers.

An attitude is a positive or negative emotional reaction to a person or object accompanied by specific believes that tend to cause its holder to behave in specific ways towards its object.

Definitions of attitude may vary slightly, most include three interrelated basic elements that are: – (1) a belief or “cognitive” component, (2) an emotional or “affective” components, and (3) an action or “behavioural” component. The components are interrelated because positive and complimentary beliefs are accompanied by liking and positive feelings, while uncomplimentary and negative beliefs are accompanied by dislike and negative feelings. These beliefs and feelings, in turn, represent a tendency to act. 

Methodology

Personally one has been working with persons with disability for four years. Recently one has done a course concerning disability and some of the lecturing staff was persons with disability. With the help of one’s personal experience and the lectures one had attended during the course, one had created a questionnaire of ten questions. Since these three lecturers had three different disabilities (visual impaired, hearing impaired and wheelchair user) one had decided to dedicate three of the ten questions in the questionnaire on this type of disability.

One had chosen a representative sample on which one had done the questionnaire. One chose 40 persons on which one had questioned and divided them in two groups; 20 people who have a personal contact or work with them and another 20 people who never had any type of contact with them. The first 20 people questioned are colleagues of the one who made the questionnaire and the other 20 are university students.