Making Decisions and Judgments on Disability: The Disability Representation of Parents, Teachers, and Special Needs Educators

Representations of disability, shaping the opinions, attitudes, and behaviour of parents, teachers and special needs educators were investigated. Two experiments were carried out: in the first one the disability representations of 90 participants were investigated through both qualitative analyses – consisting of textual interpretation of the data gathered by 17 focus groups, assisted by the Atlas.ti software – and by quantitative analyses, consisting of Chi-square statistical testing. In the second experiment, the disability representations were investigated by administering the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to 36 participants. The results obtained demonstrated that, on an implicit level, disability is strongly and stereotypically associated with a negative and unpleasant dimension of existence, compared to the richness of scripts showed in explicit explanatory disability opinions, attitudes and behaviour of the participants in different contexts.