 Attitudes towards disabilities in a multicultural societyMary T. Westbrook, Varoe Legge and Mark Pennay Social Science & Medicine, 1993, vol. 36, issue 5, 615-623 Abstract: Health practitioners (N = 665) from the Chinese, Italian, German, Greek, Arabic and Anglo Australian communities used social distance scales to rate the attitudes of people in their communities toward 20 disability groups. Significant differences were found in community attitudes toward people with 19 of these disabilities. Overall the German community expressed greatest acceptance of people with disabilities, followed by the Anglo, Italian, Chinese, Greek and Arabic groups. However the relative degree of stigma attached to the various disabilities by the communities was very similar. In all communities, people with asthma, diabetes, heart disease and arthritis were the most, and people with AIDS, mental retardation, psychiatric illness and cerebral palsy, the least accepted of the disability groups. These stigma hierarchies were remarkably similar to other hierarchies reported over the last 23 years. The findings have important implications for people with disabilities and health practitioners in multicultural societies. Keywords: disability; culture; stigma; hierarchy; attitudes (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:36:y:1993:i:5:p:615-623 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.