What do I think about inclusive education? It depends on who is asking. Experimental evidence for a social desirability bias in attitudes towards inclusion

Abstract

Recently, research has focused on attitudes towards inclusive education, and the majority of studies use questionnaires to measure this vital variable. In two consecutive experiments, we showed that attitudes towards inclusive education are not stable but instead are significantly influenced by social context. We manipulated information on the organisation conducting a survey regarding attitudes of participants towards inclusive education. The results show that the attitude of the organisation conducting the surveyas perceived by the participantoutperforms welldocumented variables (e.g. sex, age, and contact to a person with disability) in predicting the attitudes of the participant towards inclusion. This one variable explains as much variance as all other predictors combined. We argue that social desirability is a neglected issue in research on attitudes towards inclusive education. Our findings challenge the validity of numerous studies on this topic because they show a positive bias in the attitudes of participants when they were surveyed by a university. Thus, we outline the first steps to reduce social desirability-induced validity problems in research on attitudes towards inclusion. ARTICLE HISTORY

The Relationship Between Attitudes Toward Inclusion, Beliefs About Teaching and Learning, and Subsequent Automatic Evaluations Amongst Student Teachers

“…There were no significant associations between explicit beliefs and automatic evaluations, especially when focusing on constructivist beliefs about teaching and learning. One possible explanation for this finding might be that explicit measures are in part influenced by a social desirability bias (Lüke and Grosche, 2018a).…”

Legitimating Discrimination Against Students with Disability in School: The Role of Justifications of Discriminatory Behavior

“…We expected that the relation between justification and symbolic and pragmatic distancing will be mediated by the attribution to prejudice. To test these hypotheses, we conducted an experiment in a school setting, which usually protects against discrimination (Lüke & Grosche, 2018).…”

“…However, while extending the justification effect to ableism, these findings go beyond previous research by showing that the perception of less prototypical instances of discrimination (i.e., on the grounds of disability) can also be impacted by the perpetrator's motivations. Individuals with disability are a strongly protected group (Crandall et al, 2002), especially when individuals with disability are children (Lüke & Grosche, 2018). Besides, one could expect teachers to be specifically vigilant to discriminating behaviors.…”

“…Thus, teachers often hold ambivalent feelings and beliefs toward the inclusion of students with disability, in the sense of the reluctance to openly express one's own opinions and feelings on sensitive social issues. Indeed, negative attitudes toward children with disability are unacceptable in Western societies because of the very strong normative protection of the children group, in general, and of children with disability, in particular (Crandall et al, 2002;Lüke & Grosche, 2018;Rohmer & Louvet, 2018). Teachers may solve this contradiction between anti-discriminatory norms and perceived difficulties to include students with disability by overlooking discrimination when covered by benevolent justifications.…”

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“…Various studies suggest that, when the participants consider what is politically correct, the attitude revealed in the questionnaires may be affected by socially desirable responses (Hall & Minnes, 1999). As inclusion is a politically correct idea, and the majority of adolescents consider this to be the case (Verderber et al, 2003), it may be that the respondents give socially desirable answers (Avramidis & Norwich, 2002;Lui, Sin, Yang, Forlin & Ho, 2015;Lüke & Grosche, 2017). In the educational world it has been seen that social desirability predicts the attitude of students towards persons with disabilities (Strong, 1987) and that girls from nursery to university age "projected a socially desirable image of themselves" (Eisenberg, Fabes & Spinrad, 2006, p. 92).…”