Improving Adolescents’ Attitudes towards Persons with Disabilities: An Intervention Study in Secondary Education

Abstract

The relationship of disabled persons with their environment is fundamental. Attitudes towards them, understood as the social constructs of those around them, play a key role in a person’s development and future, as they are one of the fundamental elements that can facilitate or hinder the inclusion process. Our work examines the need to implement educational and awareness-raising actions and programs that contemplate intervention strategies based on education and direct contact with disabled persons. The main objective of the study was to analyze the effect of a Program for Changing Attitudes towards Persons with Disabilities on a group of secondary school students (11 to 15 years of age), assigning 770 to the experimental group and 105 to the control group. The evaluation instrument used was the “Brief Questionnaire of Attitudes towards Persons with Disabilities for Adolescents, CBAD-12A”. The results have demonstrated the efficacy of the intervention for the experimental group, as it was possible to attribute the changes in attitude to the effect of the Program. Specifically, an improvement in attitudes was found in all three factors of the questionnaire (Acceptance-Rejection, Competence and Opportunity) after the intervention.