During the last decades, the number of students with a disability in regular schools increased. One of the main reasons why parents choose for inclusive education, are the relationships and social contacts between children with a disability and their typically developing peers. However, research indicates that the social participation of children with a disability in regular education is often problematic. They appear to have  less high-quality social interactions with students without SEN, to have fewer friends  than their typically developing classmates and to be less popular (e.g., Frostad & Pijl, 2007, Bossaert, 2012). According to earlier research, attitudes, which can be defined as “a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993, p1), play a major role in the social participation of students with a disability (e.g., De Boer et al., 2012). This is especially the case in secondary and higher education where the relationships with peers becomes more important.

According to Hunt & Hunt (2000), the attitudes of students towards people with a disability are not only important in having personal contact with people with a disability, they can also influence study choice. In their study, they compared the attitudes of undergraduate business and rehabilitation services students. They found that students of rehabilitation services majors are more female, have more personal experience with people with disabilities and have more positive attitudes than the business majors. Scwartz & Armony-Sivan (2001) found the same differences between social work students and law and natural science students. Finally, Tervo & Palmer (2004) researched the attitudes towards people with a disability of health professional students and found that Occupational and Physical Therapy, Psychology, Speech and Language and Audiology students had better attitudes than Nursing students.  

Although the few existing studies found an association between attitudes and study choice, further research is needed for several reasons. First, in each of these studies, attitudes were measured by means of explicit attitude measures only, no implicit measures were used. While explicit attitudes are judgments made in awareness, implicit attitudes are automatic evaluative responses towards images of persons with disabilities and for that reason unbiased (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Wittenbrink and Schwarz, 2007).

Second, no research has made an association between the attitudes of students of different studies towards people with a disability and their behavior towards persons with disabilities. The present research will deal with each of these shortcomings.

Objectives: First, we want to investigate if Flemish students who choose for a more social study, like psychology and pedagogical sciences, have better attitudes towards people with a disability than students who choose for a more scientific or economic study, like economics, engineer or linguistics.

Second, we want to explore if students who choose for more social studies are more involved in facilities for students with a disability, like assisted living, assisted studying, … , than students who choose for more scientific or economic studies.

Finally, to provide a full picture, we want to know if study choice correlates the most with the implicit or explicit attitudes.  

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