Abstract
The purposes of this study were (a) to investigate the structure of college students' attitudes toward people with physical disabilities, and (b) to examine the relation of the students' field of study and gender to the factors obtained. University students in the sample included 145 human science majors, 107 economics majors, and 142 child education majors. They were asked to answer a 54-item questionnaire concerning physical disability, rating items on a 7-point Likert-type scale. Factor analysis of the questionnaire results yielded five psychologically meaningful oblique factors: 1. Non-acceptance in Daily Living: The college students who did not have physical disabilities tended to reject personal relations, particularly close or family relations, with people with physical disabillties in a community. 2. Emotionally Unstable Character: People with physical disabilities get discouraged easily and often become cross. 3. Social Assistance: The government and large enterprises should give financial support to people with physical disabilities and make an effort to remove enviromental barriers. 4. Happy Life: People with physical disabilities can live as happily and comfortably as those without physical disabilities. 5. Denial of Independence: People with physical disabilities should live separately from others and need not work. On the basis of correlation coefficients and content similarities among factors, the above five factors were grouped into three areas: Interpersonal Relationships (including the "Non-acceptance in Daily Living" factor), Conditions of People with Physical Disabilities (including the "Emotionally Unstable Character" and"Happy Life" factors), and Social Relations (including the "Social Assistance" and "Denial of Independence" factors). Subjects' reactions to these factors were then compared with a chi-square test [including Haberman's (1973) analysis of residuals]. The results of comparisons among the three academic majors indicated that the economics majors, when compared to the other two groups, showed less favorable reactions to the "Non-acceptance in Daily Living" factor, and reacted more positively to the "Emotionally Unstable Character" factor than the child education majors did, whereas the latter showed a more favorable reaction to the "Social Assistance" factor than the former. Results of a comparison between genders suggested that the males tended to react to the "Emotionally Unstable Character" factor more positively than the females did. Recommendations were made for future studies on attitudes toward people with physical disabilities.
