Effects of short-term disability awareness training on attitudes of adolescent schoolboys toward persons with a disability

Abstract

Background Schoolboys (N = 156, M age = 13 years) participated in a disability awareness training program that included guest speakers (athletes from the Paralympics and the Special Olympics), a documentary about people with a disability, a disability simulation activity, and factual information about different disabilities.

Method Participants were allocated to a training program or a control condition. Subsequently, control participants completed the training program. Attitudes toward disability were measured by the Chedoke–McMaster Attitudes Towards Children With Handicaps (CATCH) Scale and the scale from the “Just Like You” disability awareness intervention, before and after training.

Results Training improved attitude scores, and gains were retained at one-month follow-up.

Conclusions Disability awareness training that delivered relevant information by involving guest speakers with a disability, included documentary evidence about the lives of people with a disability, and included interactive discussion, was successful. CATCH and “Just Like You” are useful tools for measuring self-reported attitudes about disability.

Keywords:

• disability
• adolescents
• attitudes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the participants, their parents, and their teachers for the opportunity to conduct this research and to Bob Willson for advice about statistical analyses.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Author note

The research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Neither author had any conflict of interest.

Notes

1. “Boy” reflects the fact that the school was single sex.

2. Details available from the authors.

3. Discussion questions are available from the authors.

4. For ease of description, the designations “program group” and “control group” are used throughout, despite the fact that participants in both groups eventually undertook DAP training.

5. Noninteger degrees of freedom reflect violation of assumption of homogeneity of variances, as identified by Levene's test.