Ability to cope with prejudice and role of the visibility factor among paraplegics and the emotionally disturbed.

Abstract

A study was conducted to explore the attitudes of disabled persons towards individuals of similar disablement and dissimilar disablement. The study also looked into the attitudes of normal persons towards persons with visible disability--paraplegics and those with disability which was not visible--emotionally disturbed. Twenty-five subjects were in the paraplegic group, 25 in the emotionally disturbed group with the same number in the 'normal' group. The instruments used to measure attitudes were the semantic differential scale and the social distance scale. The results showed that on the social distance scale the paraplegic group rated its own group more favourably (0.72) than it rated the emotionally disturbed (1.21). On this scale the emotionally disturbed group even rated itself less favourably (1.81) than it rated the paraplegic group (1.41). On the semantic differential scale the pattern was nearly similar. Disabled subjects taken as a whole showed expression of a more favourable attitude (P less than 0.05) towards themselves than did the normal group towards them. The paraplegic group was more willing to associate with its own group than the emotionally disturbed group was towards itself. The implications of these findings have been discussed.