Measuring special education teachers’ attitudes towards students with multiple disabilities

Abstract

With this quantitative study we aimed to develop a scale that could be used to assess the attitudes of special education needs (SEN) teachers towards students with multiple disabilities. The scale was tested in 2 stages using 2 different samples. Firstly, the scale was administered to a convenience sample of 215 teachers. For the first study, the participants responded to 39 items related to the scale and 9 demographic questions. This sample was used to perform an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), which showed that the proposed scale had 5 factors and 22 items. A revised scale was applied to 228 participants. The sample was used to complete a confirmatory factor analysis to test the fit of the data to the theoretical structure. The scale’s internal consistency was found to have a Cronbach α of 0.869. With this scale it will be possible to measure special education teachers’ attitudes towards students with multiple disabilities.