Vol. 52, No. 1, 2009 - Alpha Chi

Pr e j u d i c e To wa r d s t h e Di s a b l e d
males may suggest that innate or implicit gender differences may exist. If this is the case,
these variables could be mediating the relationship between gender and explicit prejudice,
which may explain why empirical research on this topic often varies dramatically depending
on experimental methodology.
The majority of the research findings support limited previous research and suggest that
relationships between implicit and explicit attitudes towards this population are similar to
those towards other minority groups. The results have also brought up concerns regarding
the ability to generalize findings of studies utilizing the rehabilitation student/professional
participant population. Additional research using a multidimensional measure of contact
is necessary to determine the complex relationship between contact and both implicit and
explicit attitude negativity. Further research is also needed to determine the precise gender
differences resulting in differing degrees of negativity towards persons with physical
disabilities and other minority groups. An analysis of previous studies investigating the
effect of gender on prejudice levels is also necessary to determine if this variability results
from the unintentional ability of some attitude measures to tap into implicit attitudes in
addition to explicit attitudes.
The primary limitation of this study was the relatively small sample size. The timeconsuming
procedure and the costly specialized software necessary to obtain the implicit
measure created a high resource investment per participant. A new version of the Implicit
software is now available that posts IAT’s onto a web page and enables multiple participants
to take the IAT simultaneously. Further research could utilize this software in order to obtain
a larger sample size. Another limitation was the lack of empirically tested explicit attitude
measures of negativity towards persons with physical disabilities. Although the ATDP-O
is one of the most reputable and widely used measures, it has received some criticism for
being outdated due to changes in societal laws and norms regarding persons with physical
disabilities. Several other explicit measures of attitude exist, but they do not share the
reputation and frequency of use that the ATDP-O has accumulated. An updated version
of the ATDP, or the creation of a similar measure with comparable validity and reliability,
would be highly useful in future research.
Table 1
Correlations between Attitude Measures, Social Desirability and Contact
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Attitude measure Variable Correlation coefficient
p value
IAT ATPDS r = -.15 p = .17
Social Desirability r = -.03 p = .42
Contact Score r = -.33 p = .02
ATPDS IAT r = .15 p = .17
Social Desirability r = .04 p = .41
Contact Score r = .06 p = .36
Note: Correlation is significant at the .05 level (one-tailed).