Interaction with disabled persons scale: Factor structure verification

Abstract

Examining attitudes towards people with disabilities has been a field of interest of numerous authors in recent years. Accordingly, different scales for measuring attitudes have been used, both at social and personal level. Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale is the most widely used scale for measuring attitudes at personal level . It is designed to measure attitudes regarding the discomfort that people can feel when engaging in social interaction with people with disabilities. The aim of this paper was to determine the factor structure of the Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale. The research included 462 students of the Faculty of Medicine in Foča, who were attending three study programs: Medicine, Special Education and Rehabilitation and Health Care. In order to determine the factor structure of the scale, the main components were extracted with orthogonal varimax rotation. The results showed that two factors were found which explain 37,69% of variance and were named Empathy and Discomfort and Fear. Three items with low factor saturation were omitted from this version of the scale. Disagreement with other authors with regard to the number of factors obtained imposes the need to check the structure of the IDP scale on different and numerous samples for the purpose of evaluating the invariance of the scale in different contexts.

Keywords

• attitudes
• factor analysis
• people with disabilities
• students