Abstract
Discovering the role of negative attitudes in the social functioning of people with disabilities, tools were developed to measure these attitudes, of which the Multidimensional Attitude Scale of People with Disabilities (MAS) is a good one. It is particularly important to study the attitudes of people who are professionally involved in meeting the needs of people with disabilities. The aim of this study was to determine the attitudes towards people with physical disabilities among medical and health sciences students regarding gender, year of study, field of study, and place of residence. The study was conducted among 625 students in Poland with the use of the MAS-PL scale. The results obtained indicate that women display more positive attitudes towards people with disabilities than men in the cognition and behavioural domains. In the emotional domain, these attitudes were more negative than in the other domains and almost identical for both genders. The year of study, field of study, and place of residence did not differentiate students in terms of their MAS score. Since the sociodemographic variables studied do not determine a positive attitude, educational interventions to increase contact with people with disabilities should be undertaken in future research, and this factor should be investigated as an element of attitude modulation.
Highlights
We would like to refer to the definition from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which fully reflects the social model of disability
Given the inconsistency of results among existing MAS studies, it can be assumed that gender has an effect on the attitudes as measured by MAS depending on nationality and type of disability
The results of our Polish study indicate that women manifested more positive attitudes towards people with physical disabilities than men in the cognitive and behavioural domains
Summary
We would like to refer to the definition from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which fully reflects the social model of disability In this view, a person with a disability appears as a subject and a full human being and not as an object of care. More problematic are the barriers inherent in the mentality of societies, which lead to the stigmatisation and social exclusion of people with disabilities. These negative attitudes have been rooted in societies for a long time [2,3]
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