Determinants of students’ attitudes towards peers with disabilities

The move to inclusive education started about 40 years ago in the US and now is a key policy in a number of countries, including Scandinavia, the UK, and France.1 Many other countries still have significant numbers of children with disabilities in special schools or special classes, while other countries, e.g. the Netherlands, are currently changing their system to inclusive education. The term inclusive education indicates that the school has the responsibility to modify its environment to meet the needs of pupils with developmental disabilities or special educational needs. Advocates of inclusive education not only emphasize the benefits for the children with special needs, but also the opportunities for the other students to discover these children as their peers and as friends.2 However, various studies in the 1980s showed that in the integrated setting the disabled child often remains socially isolated and at risk of emotional problems as a result of a process of neglect rather than rejection by peers.3 Different programs have been developed to improve children’s attitudes towards peers with disabilities, for example by providing positive structured experiences with disabled children. It was hoped that these programs would be implemented and would make a difference. It is interesting to know how students now feel, think, and what they do in a school with peers with disabilities. Are they afraid of a disabled child? Would they sit next to a disabled child? Do they believe that disabled children make new friends? In this issue of DMCN, Vignes and colleagues have explored students’ attitudes towards their peers with disabilities in a large community sample of adolescents (aged 10–15y) from 12 secondary schools, six with a special educational unit, as an example of inclusive education in France. Students’ attitudes were assessed using the Chedoke-McMaster Attitudes Towards Children with Handicaps (CATCH) scale, which simultaneously measures the three components of attitudes, i.e. the affective, behavioural, and cognitive dimensions. The authors found a suboptimal score for the CATCH total score and the three different dimension scores. It is remarkable that the scores are almost similar to the findings in a study performed by King et al.4 20 years ago in Canada, indicating that children’s attitudes, on average, have not changed and are generally more negative towards peers with disabilities than towards non-disabled peers. This finding is in line with a recent review on the effectiveness of inclusive education that demonstrated a lack of evidence from appropriate studies, and where evidence does exist, the balance was only marginally positive for both social and educational outcomes.1 A study with 1135 students made it possible to explore associations between the attitude (CATCH) scores and personal characteristics of the students, disability knowledge, and contextual factors (e.g. school characteristics). This study was able to confirm the independent contribution of several factors associated with positive attitudes towards peers with disabilities such as sex (being female), good health-related quality of life, knowledge about disabilities, and being a friend with a peer with a disability. Previous studies showed similar patterns but the literature has not been as clear as these studies had smaller sample sizes and looked at less factors. The statistically significant differences in mean attitude scores, however, should not be overestimated as these were very small (approximately 1–2 points on the CATCH scale). Moreover, the clinical meaning of this magnitude of difference in CATCH scores is not clear yet. The authors could not demonstrate an association between age and attitudes in their study with a cross-sectional design. As negative attitudes to peers with psychological problems can be found even in young primary school children5 (from as young as 7 or 8y) there is a need to study the way in which children develop attitudes in a longitudinal study. School is a place where children learn about each other and about the world around them. True participation in school therefore should be an ultimate goal of health, education, and social services for disabled children. The work by Vignes and colleagues makes clear that environment (school) and environmental attitudes regarding disability can be determining factors in the lives of children with disabilities. It is time to expand our horizon and to think about ways to modify the natural environment in which children participate.6 It is the ‘how’ of education that should be emphasized rather than the question where education takes place. Research is needed to find ways to support optimal education for children with disabilities. Much can be learned from qualitative studies on relations between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers.7 The area of school participation is complex in its nature and therefore is an ideal theme for interdisciplinary childhood disability research that should bring together researchers from the field of special education, sociology, and medicine.

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