Key ideas

Literature review of measuring attitudes of young children towards children with disabilities, read for survey design course

Article discusses ways of measuring how typically developing children react/feel about children with disabilities, especially young children. Theoretical framework is Triandis:

• cognitive (how much do you know about disabilities)
• emotional (how do you feel about kids with disabilities)
• behavioural (what do you do - what actions/roles do you perform)

There were a number of different research approaches

• surveys (using many existing scales and measures)
• using dolls or drawings/photos and hypotheticals
• sorting pictures of classmates (after first practicing sorting foods etc) according to preference
• interview
• prompting with videos (Sesame Street etc)
• observation of play activity

Few statistical relationships were discussed, mainly between self-reported attitudes and actual playground behaviour (different studies are contradictory).