Session Information
04 SES 09 G, Inclusion in Young Peoples' Lives
Paper Session
Contribution
Assesing attitudes of students toward their peers with disability can emerge as an important step for the accomplishement of social participation of all indepedently to their difficulties and the implementation of inclusion policy of students with disablities in the general school system (Bossaert et al., 2011).
According to previous research, general school students expressed posistive attitude toward their co-students with disability (Rosenbaum et al, 1986). Especially, students show high score in the affective and behavioural subscales of attitudes and lower score in cognitive domain (Tirosh, Shanin & Reiter, 1997; Vignes et al. 2009). Research (Rosenbaum et al., 1988) showed that girls adopt more positive attitude in all of the three subscales (coginitive, affective, behavioural) in comparison with boys. Furthermore, friendship with a friend with disability exerts a positive role on students' attitudes toward their classmates with disability (Tirosh, Shanin & Reiter, 1997). A person with disability who belongs to the close family environment has a positive effect on the formation of attitudes (Vignes, et al., 2009), a finding that contradicts with other study (Gonçalves & Lemos 2014). Communication in frequent periods with a person with disability leads to positive attitudes (Thomson & Lilly, 1995). Additionally, students who present a severe disbality are more acceptable compared to students with mild disability (Cook & Semel, 1999). Also, place of residence showed to be a discriminated factor of attitudes, where students who stay in urban areas express a higher level of positive attitudes unlike to chlidren who are staying in rural areas (Gash & Coffey, 1995). The same study showed that children in the beggining of adolescence express a higher level of social interest for students with disabilities in contrast with other research (Rosenbaum, Armstrong and King, 1988). Furthermore, a pupil with disabilities who attend a general school positively affects the formation of attitudes (Alnahdi, 2019).
Method
In the present study participated 1348 students, who attend attend general junior high and high schools. The instrument used was the "Chedoke-McMaster Attitudes Towards Children with Handicaps questionnaire", (CATCH) (Rosenbaum, et al., 1986). The psychometric tool contains 36 items, where each attitude dimension is represented by 12 questions, which is an equal number of statements, positively and negatively formatted (Godeau et al., 2010), organized in random sequence. Answers are scored in a 5-point Likert scale and the negatively worded items are inversely coded (Thomson &Lilllie, 1995). The items are organized in three subscales: affective, behavioral, cognitive (Rosenbaum, Armstrong, & King, 1986). Level of reliability resulted as a = 0.90 and test-retest reliability scored equal to 0.74 (Rosenbaum, Armstrong, & King, 1988). The same research revealed the following psychometric qualities for the three subscales of the questionnaire, affective, behavioral and cognitive which are a = 0. 81, a = 0.82, a = 0.76 respectively. The second part of the questionnaire contained demographics variables such as gender, school grade, age, place of residence, participants’ special need, special needs domain, having a friend with disability, place where the student met the special needs classmate, attending the same school, type of disability, grade of disability, contact or shared activity with the classmate with disability, family member with disability, if the member belongs to the immediate family or the relatives environment (Beck & Dennis, 1996; Gonçalves&Lemos, 2014 ). The questionnaire was by two bilingual translators, in an independent way, and then, it was given to 5 students for completion. Then, two teachers checked the items wording and meaning. A "reverse translation" followed and the authentic questionnaire was translated into English by two researchers specializing in the design of attitudes psychometric tools in order to verify validity of content with the process of structured content analysis (Weber, 1990). The research was conducted following the stratified sampling based on the population of departments in Greece, after he official license, which was offered by the Greek Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs.
Expected Outcomes
The results confirmed the three subscales (KMO = .801, Bartlett‟s Test of Sphericity, x2 = 9308.498, df = 210, p < 0.001), which explains the 57,457% of the total variance. Each of the three dimensions that have emerged include a different number of questions than those listed on the authentic scale. Differences were found regarding to gender, age, school type (junior-high or high school), year of birth, students who live in urban cities, students who have a friend with special needs and students who have not any contact with a special need pupil, mild and severe disability, family member with disability. A school, where students with disabilities participate (Alnahdi, 2019) and age (Al-Kandari, 2015; Alnahdi, 2019) are emerged as more valuable predicted factors for attitudes development as well as gender and previous contact with a person with disability (Tirosh, Shanin & Reiter, 1997).
References
Alnahdi, G. H., Saloviita, T., &Elhadi, A. (2019). Inclusive education in Saudi Arabia and Finland: pre‐ service teachers‟ attitudes. Support for Learning, 34(1), 71-85. Al-Kandari, H. Y. (2015). High school students' contact with and attitudes towards persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Kuwait. Australian Social Work, 68(1), 65-83. Beck, A., & Dennis, M. (1996). Attitudes of children toward a similar-aged child who uses augmentative communication. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 12(2), 78-87. Bossaert, G., Colpin, H., Pijl, S. J., & Petry, K. (2011). The attitudes of Belgian adolescents towards peers with disabilities. Research in Developmental disabilities, 32(2), 504-509. Cook, B. G., & Semmel, M. I. (1999). Peer acceptance of included students with disabilities as a function of severity of disability and classroom composition. The Journal of Special Education, 33(1), 50-61. Gash, H., & Coffey, D. (1995). Influences on attitudes toward children with mental handicap. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 10 (1), 1-16. Godeau, E., Vignes, C., Sentenac, M., Ehlinger, V., Navarro, F., Grandjean, H., & Arnaud, C. (2010). Improving attitudes towards children with disabilities in a school context: A cluster randomized intervention study. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 52(10), e236-e242. Gonçalves, T., & Lemos, M. (2014). Personal and social factors influencing students’ attitudes towards peers with special needs. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 112, 949-955. Rosenbaum, P. L., Armstrong, R. W., & King, S. M. (1986). Children's attitudes toward disabled peers: A self-report measure. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 11(4), 517-530. Rosenbaum, P. L., Armstrong, R. W., & King, S. M. (1988). Determinants of children's attitudes toward disability: A review of evidence. Children's Health Care, 17(1), 32-39. Thomson, D. J.,&Lilly, L. (1995). The effects of integration on the attitudes of non-disabled pupils to their disabled peers. Physiotherapy, 81(12), 746-752. Tirosh, E., Schanin, M., & Reiter, S. (1997). Children's attitudes toward peers with disabilities: the Israeli perspective. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 39(12), 811-814. Vignes, C., Godeau, E., Sentenac, M., Coley, N., Navarro, F., Grandjean, H., & Arnaud, C. (2009). Determinants of students‟ attitudes towards peers with disabilities. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 51(6), 473-479. Weber, R. P. (1990). Basic content analysis (Vol. 49). Sage Publications, Incorporated.
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