Development of a Standardized Scale Measuring Public Beliefs and Knowledge About Service Dogs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public spaces can be difficult to navigate for individuals who rely on service dogs (SDogs) to aid with their disability/ies. Literature suggests this may be due to varying levels of social acceptance and public understanding of SDogs compared with other animal-assisted services. Additionally, there are misconceptions around SDog standards and public access rights that can lead to welfare concerns and human rights violations for SDog teams. The current study sought to determine salient beliefs and knowledge that the general public has regarding SDog teams. This was achieved by qualitatively measuring participants’ knowledge about SDogs and developing a scale measuring beliefs and knowledge related to SDogs. A random stratified sample of Canadians (n = 433) completed a 20-minute online questionnaire examining their knowledge and general beliefs about SDogs. Results indicated low knowledge of SDogs. SDogs were described by some participants as medical equipment and tools for their handlers without consideration of their role as supportive sentient beings. For further insight, we compared knowledge of SDogs with emotional support dogs (ESDogs) and found that most participants accurately reported differences between the two, but many believed SDogs are only for physical disabilities while ESDogs are for psychological disabilities. There was low support for SDog public access and high support for public engagement with SDogs in public spaces, high concern for SDog welfare, and high standards for SDog behavior. Regression results indicated that higher support for SDogs to be in public spaces was related to their lower knowledge of SDogs. Overall, our sample did not appear to be well-informed on SDogs and SDog teams. Future studies developing and testing knowledge- and belief-based interventions on public education regarding SDogs and their public access rights may be warranted as well as validation of the belief-based scale we developed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".