Greater autism knowledge and contact with autistic people are independently associated with favourable attitudes towards autistic people

Alanna J Shand,Punit Shah,Scarlett A D Close,Hannah Schacter

doi:10.1017/exp.2020.46

Abstract

AbstractUnderstanding individual differences in attitudes to autism is crucial for improving attitudes and reducing stigma towards autistic people, yet there is limited and inconsistent research on this topic. This is compounded by a lack of appropriate measures and multivariate analyses. Addressing these issues, using up-to-date measures and multiple linear regression, we examined the relative contributions of participant age, sex, autism knowledge, level of contact with autistic people, and autistic traits to attitudes towards autistic people. We found that greater autism knowledge and higher levels of contact, but no other variables, were uniquely predictive of attitudes towards autistic people. We conclude that, in addition to public awareness campaigns to raise knowledge of autism, it may be important to increase contact between autistic and non-autistic people to improve public attitudes towards autistic people.

Highlights

There is surprisingly little research on understanding and improving attitudes to autism
Autism knowledge and level of contact were not significantly correlated, yet both variables were positively associated with attitudes towards autistic people
The main conclusion from our study is that greater autism knowledge and higher levels of contact with autistic people are independently associated with favourable attitudes towards autistic people

Summary

Introduction

There is surprisingly little research on understanding and improving attitudes to autism. In the limited body of existing research, there are several issues with current understanding of the individual differences underlying attitudes towards autistic people. There is inconsistent evidence for and against participants’ age (e.g., Kuzminski et al, 2019), sex (e.g., Cage et al, 2019), and autism knowledge and autistic traits (e.g., Mac Cárthaigh & López, 2020) being related to their attitudes to autism. Whilst there is relatively clear evidence for greater contact with autistic people being predictive of more favourable attitudes and prosocial behaviours towards these individuals (e.g., Payne & Wood, 2016), this is not always accounted for when investigating other predictors of attitudes to autism

Methods

Results

Conclusion