Faxtors Influencing College Students’ Attitudes Toward People With Disabilities: A Conjoint Analysis

Negative attitudes toward people with disabilities have existed for thousands ofyears. This "invisible barrier" has great influence on the people with disabilities of lifeexperience, employment opportunities, seeking help behavior. However there aregreat quantities of research on the attitudes toward people with disabilities in the West,while it has relatively little research in this field at home.Based on summarizing the theory of attitudes toward people with disabilities andthe attitude measurement methods at home and abroad, we focus on the application ofconjoint analysis method analyzing the factors that influence the attitudes ofundergraduates toward people with disabilities. The305participants who come fromtwo certain normal college and medical college of Shenyang were asked to sort22cards developed from the conjoint analysis based on their personal preferences forworking with persons with disabilities in a hypothetical companion program. Theresearch mainly study factors affecting students’ preference attitudes toward peoplewith disabilities and also support parts of results of similar research in Taiwan areaand abroad. The study results are as follows:(1) The important attributes that influence the preference attitudes towardspeople with disabilities of college students are disability type, disability degree, ageand education, while the gender and work status have no significant influence in thestudy. And for the college students’ attitudes toward people with disabilities, therelative importance scores for disability-related attributes are significantly higher thanthe disability-unrelated attributes.(2) Conjoint analysis effectively illustrates combination and separation weight ofevery factor influencing college students’ attitudes toward people with disabilities.which is an indirect measuring method that can truly reflect the attitudes towardpeople with disabilities.(3) College students have different preferences in different attributes levels. Inthe disability-type attribute levels, college students’ preference order is along thephysically disability to mental disability continuous direction; In disability-degreeattribute levels, students preference order range from severe disability to mild disability direction; At age attribute levels, college students prefer young disabledpeople; At education attribute levels, college students prefer higher educated disabledpeople.(4) Although college students are little contact with people with disabilities.people who has contact experience with respect to non-contact experience,disability-unrelated attributes were increased in their preference determination...