Attitudes of a college population toward cripples

Date

1958

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Abstract

In an attempt to determine the kinds of attitudes held by college students toward crippled persons, the present research was initiated. Test booklets which contained the Story Construction Test, the Sentence Completion Test, the California Fascism Scale, the Taylor Scale of Manifest Anxiety, and the Disability Questionnaire were administered to 161 college students during the summer session of 1956. The major hypotheses of study, stated in the form of null hypotheses, were substantiated by analyses of the data. In the Story Construction Test, the subjects were requested to write stories in response to a relatively ambiguous picture projected by an opaque projector upon a screen. The stimulus was structured as a young crippled man. Variations in time of imposition of crippling differentiated the population into tree groups. In a later investigation the stimulus was structured as a young man. The subjects in this s tudy and in the later study expressed predominantly negative attitudes in their stories irrespective of whether the stimulus was structured as a cripple or as a non-cripple. It was concluded that qualities inherent in the stimulus iteself, and not the variations in structure, predisposed dthe subjects of this study toward negative valuations. In the Sentence Completion Test, there were eleven incomplete statements about cripples. Attitudes revealed through completions were predominantly positive. Attitude scores of both the Story Construction Test and the Sentence Completion Test were found not to be affected by time of imposition of crippling, authoritarianism, manifest anxiety, or by claim of physical disability. However story attitude scores were observed to be related to sex.

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Keywords

College students, People with disabilities

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