Session Information
04 SES 05 A, Culture and Attitudes
Paper Session
Contribution
Over the past decades, the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN) in regular schools has become a global trend (Pijl, Meijer, & Hegarty, 1997). In the inclusion debate, social participation has been considered a key issue. Social contact and relations with typical peers have been identified as parent’s first motive for their children’s placement in a mainstream school (Scheepstra, Nakken, & Pijl, 1999). However, research addressing the social participation of children with SEN has revealed that peer interactions between students with and without SEN may not spontaneously occur (Frostad & Pijl, 2007). Despite the increasing number of studies on the social inclusion of students with SEN, there are some major lacks in the current knowledge base. First, social participation of students with SEN has primarily been studied using primary school samples despite the fact that social participation becomes more vital and complex at the level of secondary education. Secondly, current research has mainly focused on the quantitative feature of social participation (e.g., number of friends), disregarding other features of social participation as the quality or stability of social relations or the characteristics of friends, such as their attitudes. In contemporary research, an association between SEN students’ social participation and the attitudes of their classmates is assumed. However, different theories about the direction of effects prevail (i.e., contact hypothesis vs. theory of planned behavior). Finally, the vast majority of research on the social participation of students with SEN has been conducted in North America. Nevertheless, research suggests that culture plays an important role in the formation and development of social relations, socio-emotional development of children (Chen et al., 2004) and attitudes (Townsend & Hassall, 2007).
By means of a large-scaled, longitudinal study, currently being conducted in Flemish secondary schools, we aim to extend the current knowledge base. This paper reports on a pilot study which was conducted in the earlier phases of the main study. Because the CATCH scale (Rosenbaum, Armstrong, & King, 1986), developed to assess students’ attitudes towards peers with disabilities, was never used in a Dutch speaking country before or tested among high school students, and nothing was known about Flemish students’ attitudes towards peers with disabilities, a pilot study was set up. Three aims were connected to this pilot study. A first goal was to explore the psychometric properties of the Dutch translation of the CATCH scale. To ensure the reliability of the scale in a sample of secondary school students in Flanders, the factorial structure of the CATCH scale was studied. The second goal was to explore and compare students’ attitudes towards peers with disabilities internationally. The third goal was to investigate the association with personal factors (i.e., gender, age, and self-proclaimed friends), ‘disability knowledge’ factors (i.e., have a disability themselves, acquaintance with a person with a disability, type of relation with a person with a disability, frequency of contact, attitude towards different types of disabilities, and manner of presentation) and ‘contextual factors’ (i.e., type of education).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Chen, X., He, Y., De Oliveira, A. M., Lo Coco, A., Zappulla, C., Kaspar, V. et al. (2004). Loneliness and social adaptation in Brazilian, Canadian, Chinese and Italian children: a multi-national comparative study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45, 1373-1384. Frostad, P. & Pijl, S. J. (2007). Does being friendly help in making friends? The relation between the social position and social skills of pupils with special needs in mainstream education. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 22, 15-30. Pijl, S. J., Meijer, C. J., & Hegarty, S. (1997). Inclusive education: A global agenda. London: Routledge. Rosenbaum, P., Armstrong, R., & King, S. (1986). Children's attitudes toward disabled peers: A self-report measure. Journal of pediatric psychology, 11, 517-530. Scheepstra, A. J. M., Nakken, H., & Pijl, S. J. (1999). Contacts with classmates: The social position of pupils with Down's syndrome in Dutch mainstream education. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 14, 212-220. Townsend, M. & Hassall, J. (2007). Mainstream Students' Attitudes to Possible Inclusion in Unified Sports with Students who have an Intellectual Disability. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 20, 265-273. Vignes, C., Godeau, E., Sentenac, M., Coley, N., Niavarro, F., Grandjean, H. et al. (2009). Determinants of student's attitudes towards peers with disabilities. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 51, 473-479.
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