How university students view disabled people: The role of wheelchairs, canes, and unspecified mobility aids.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE/OBJECTIVE: Mobility aids are important to disabled people as a functional tool that can enhance their participation in leisure activities and work; however, mobility aids may also have implications for how disabled people are viewed by others. Using theories from social psychology, this study aimed to understand how mobility aids contribute to the perception of mobility aid users. RESEARCH METHOD: A total of 259 participants without disabilities, who were primarily young, Caucasian, female-identifying university students, completed the questionnaires. The primary questionnaires of interest included the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale Toward Persons with Disabilities and the Stereotype Content Model. Every participant completed three conditions of the questionnaires to examine their attitudes and stereotypes associated with three mobility aid conditions: a wheelchair, a cane, and a control condition without a specified mobility aid. RESULTS: Affective attitudes toward the unspecified mobility aid condition and the manual wheelchair condition were more negative than the cane condition. Perceived warmth was higher for the manual wheelchair condition compared to the unspecified mobility aid condition and perceived competence was higher for the cane and manual wheelchair conditions compared to the unspecified mobility aid condition. CONCLUSION: This study explored how young women without disabilities, and potentially nondisabled people more generally, may hold a range of attitudes and stereotypes about the use of mobility aids by disabled people. These findings have implications for the design of effective attitudinal change programs and for rehabilitation professionals who work with individuals as they adopt mobility aids following the onset of disability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".