2022 Volume 92 Issue 6 Pages 532-542
Handicapped people have faced discriminatory attitudes from the non-handicapped. This often deprives them of fundamental human rights and can exacerbate mental illness. Symbolic ableism is one of the key forms of discriminatory attitudes toward the handicapped, and this is regarded as a cause of disagreement with policies to support the handicapped. The propensity of symbolic ableism can be measured by the Symbolic Ableism Scale (SAS; Friedman & Awsumb, 2019), which divides symbolic ableism into four components: individualism, lack of recognition of continuing discrimination, lack of empathy for disabled people, and excessive demands. Although this scale is necessary for understanding people’s attitudes toward the handicapped, it is not available in Japanese. This study was conducted to develop a Japanese version of SAS (SAS-J) and examined its reliability and validity. The result showed that SAS-J was divided into two components (i.e., individualism and lack of recognition of current condition), which is different from the original version. We discussed possible explanations of this difference, the reliability and validity of SAS-J, and future directions of symbolic ableism.
