Attitudes of Students of Social Sciences and Humanities towards People with Physical Disabilities (MAS-PL)

Dorota Tomczyszyn, Anna Pańczuk and Adam Szepeluk
Additional contact information
Dorota Tomczyszyn: Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Pope John Paul II State School of Higher Education in Biała Podlaska, 21-500 Biała Podlaska, Poland
Anna Pańczuk: Department of Physiotherapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, Pope John Paul II State School of Higher Education in Biała Podlaska, 21-500 Biała Podlaska, Poland
Adam Szepeluk: Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Technical Sciences, Pope John Paul II State School of Higher Education in Biała Podlaska, 21-500 Biała Podlaska, Poland

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 3, 1-14

Abstract: Negative social attitudes towards people with disabilities are a serious barrier to their social, professional, and cultural functioning. Due to negative perception, disabled individuals are often homebound. The present study was an attempt to compare declared attitudes with the results of other studies using the Polish version of an international assessment tool. The aim was to verify the MAS-PL tool and to analyse the attitudes of students of social sciences and humanities towards people with physical disabilities. An additional aim was to compare declared attitudes with the results of other studies using the Polish version of an international assessment tool for students of medicine and health sciences. In total, 540 students were surveyed using the Polish adaptation of the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale towards Persons with Disabilities (MAS-PL). The study confirmed the high reliability of the MAS-PL Scale. The mean global score of the scale was 82.79. There were no significant differences in the global MAS-PL score depending on respondents’ sex; however, an effect of this variable on the subscales was found. The surveyed females exhibited more positive attitudes in terms of the cognitive and behavioural components, whereas the males showed more positive attitudes in the affective subscale. There was no significant impact of the place of residence, age, and majors. Along with the year of studies, the intensity of the global and affective scale slightly increased. The surveyed students of social sciences and humanities exhibited similar attitudes towards people with physical disabilities to those declared by Polish students of medical and health sciences surveyed by Radlińska et al. The authors recommend implementation of didactic classes, projects, and activities at the stage of planning and creation of student education programs to promote tolerance towards disabled people.

Keywords: disability; attitudes; MAS-PL; students; Poland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1544/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1544/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:3:p:1544-:d:738017

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().