The Multidimensional Character of Biased Perceptions of Individuals with Disabilities (2001)

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 has sensitized many individuals in business and industry to the fact that discrimination aimed at individuals with disabilities is as unjust as discrimination against ethnic and racial minorities. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the moral consciousness it aroused helped eliminate many of the discriminatory employment practices directed toward minorities. Individuals with disabilities have not been as fortunate in terms of employment over the past 35 years. While African-Americans and other racial minorities have made gains toward equality in employment, a significant percentage of the American population remains unemployed. The Senate Committee on Labor and Human Relations reported that 67% of individuals with disabilities between the ages of 16 and 64 are unemployed (Simpkins & Kaplan, 1991). Fifty-eight percent of all men and 80% of all women are unable to find gainful employment (Thornburgh, 1991). Furthermore, Harris and Associates (cited in Satcher & Hendren, 1991) found that approximately 66% of the unemployed individuals with disabilities that they surveyed wanted to work, suggesting that these unemployment figures do not simply reflect self-selection out of the workforce. Despite such statistics, most research on discrimination in the workplace has continued to center on either race or gender-based discrimination. Little research is found on determining the current level of discrimination or on determining the possible causal and/or mediating variables that lead to the biased perceptions of an individual with a disability. An additional concern regarding much of the research on and discrimination is that many scales designed to measure attitudes toward individuals with disabilities rely on unidimensional measures of affect toward the disabled. Scale developers have concentrated on unidimensional measures that seem to assume constant bias potential within and even across disabilities. That is, an assumption is made that individual's with a given disability are perceived similarly by a non-disabled individual. This approach also often makes the unlikely assumption that individual's with vastly different disabilities are perceived equally by the non-disabled. This approach has resulted in scales such as the Attitudes Towards Disabled Persons Scale (Yuker, Block, & Younng, 1966) and the Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale (Gething, 1994) that ask questions about disabled people [sic] in general terms in an effort to generate and then measure attitudes of the test-taker. Moreover, these scales typically use the computation of total scores on these instruments. This practice has sometimes led researchers and practitioners to erroneously assume that a single dimension can account for perceptions of an individual with a disability. An estimated 43 million individuals were covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act when it was originally introduced (Pierce, 1991). These 43 million individuals are not a homogenous group and perceptions of them are likely to vary as well. An individual's perception of a worker with a learning disability is likely to be quite different than their perception of someone with alcoholism or epilepsy. Although some perceptions toward individuals with disabilities may have a common factor, it is not likely the entire explanation. It seems more plausible that many interrelated factors determine an individual worker or employer's attitude toward a given individual with a disability. Cursory evidence exists in the literature to support the idea that such underlying factors are important, and that, a single generalized attitude does not provide a complete or satisfactory explanation of perceptions of the person. Bordieri and Drehmer (1986) found that if a job applicant was personally responsible for their own disability that they were likely to receive lower evaluations from raters. …