The effect of two disability-awareness training models on stigmatizing attitudes among future healthcare professionals

Stigmatizing attitudes about disability are a major problem for people who have disabilities, those who interact with them in healthcare settings, and society at large. Past efforts to decrease the negative attitudes surrounding disability have used interaction and exposure activities as mechanisms of change. Research involving Contact Theory shows that casual, unstructured contact often results in stereotype confirmation and a worsening of attitudes between groups of people. Although Contact Theory was developed and tested in the arena of race and ethnicity, recent research has indicated that racial prejudice and disability stigma are essentially the same processes, which promotes the use of Contact Theory in disability research. Using the principles of Contact Theory for program design, this research compared two different workshops intended to decrease negative attitudes about disability among future healthcare professionals. Students from three college majors (Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Recreation) were recruited and randomly assigned to an experiential workshop or a didactic workshop. Participants were administered the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale (MAS) towards persons with disabilities following the workshops. These data were compared with a control group of students from the same majors to determine the efficacy of the workshops in promoting attitude change. Results indicate that neither workshop decreased negative attitudes compared to the baseline results for students from these college majors. The measurement of attitudes using the MAS is a central issue identified in this research. Identifying personal levels of stigma versus awareness of social patterns of stigma is an area needing further research prior to renewed comparisons of workshop curricula.