Public Attitudes Toward People With Intellectual Disabilities After Viewing Olympic or Paralympic Performance

Abstract

Despite some changes to the way that people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are viewed in society, negative attitudes prevail. One of the aspirations of the 2012 Paralympic games was to influence the public's attitudes toward people with disabilities. The aim of this study was to investigate whether stimuli depicting people with ID performing at Paralympic level of competition change attitudes toward ID. A mixed randomized comparison design was employed comparing 2 groups: those who viewed Paralympic-level ID sport footage and information and those who viewed Olympic footage and information. One hundred fourteen students, mean age 25 yr, were administered measures of implicit (subconscious) attitudes toward disability and explicit (belief-based) attitudes toward ID. Implicit attitudes significantly changed in a positive direction for both groups. The findings provide evidence that both Paralympic (ID) and Olympic media coverage may have at least a short-term effect on attitudes toward people with disabilities.

Changing Attitudes Toward People With Disabilities Using Public Media: An Experimental Study

“…In a quasi-experimental study, Reinhardt et al (2014) reported that participants without disabilities demonstrated increased positive attitudes toward PWDs regarding their employability as police officers after watching a 3-min video clip describing how a detective, who used a wheelchair, arrested a criminal who had just committed a robbery. In addition, Ferrara, Burns, and Mills (2015) conducted an experimental study to compare attitude change toward PWDs among participants who were randomly assigned to a group to watch a 20-min video of either Paralympic Games or Olympic Games. The outcomes showed that in both groups, participants' explicit attitudes toward PWDs showed little change in their pretest and posttest scores, while their implicit attitude scores indicated a positive change.…”

Design in the Public Square

“…Keith et al argued that infuential contact that is perceived as "equally cooperative and pleasant" is necessary for positive change in awareness [25]. Sports, in particular, are regarded as powerful activities for changing societal perceptions on the capabilities of people with a range of disabilities [12,14]. However, to the best of our knowledge, factors related to perception and awareness within sporting activities have only been observationally studied, with a dearth of research exploring mixed-ability sport engagement.…”

The impact of exposure to media coverage of the 2012 Paralympic Games on mixed physical ability interactions

“…Moreover, the extent that mass media can offer positive indirect intergroup contact within the mixed physical ability context remains under‐researched. Specifically, although viewing purposively selected Paralympic footage in the lab has been shown to improve the implicit disability attitudes of nondisabled people (Ferrara, Burns, & Mills, ), the impact of Paralympic media exposure in the real‐world has not been substantively assessed, including among disabled people themselves.…”

“…Moreover, the extent that mass media can offer positive indirect intergroup contact within the mixed physical ability context remains under-researched. Specifically, although viewing purposively selected Paralympic footage in the lab has been shown to improve the implicit disability attitudes of nondisabled people (Ferrara, Burns, & Mills, 2015), the impact of Paralympic media exposure in the real-world has not been substantively assessed, including among disabled people themselves. This paper addresses these gaps by investigating exposure to Paralympic media coverage on both physically disabled and nondisabled group members, using a longitudinal design to demonstrate if the necessary condition for causality exists (i.e., direction of an effect; see Binder et al, 2009, p. 8).…”