Abstract

The research question is whether participation in a two-session workshop led by self-advocates with mild intellectual disability, supported by professional staff, affects high school students’ impression of people with intellectual disability, measured by a self-report questionnaire based on a semantic differential. The study was paper-pencil questionnaire-based and anonymous, conducted in Warsaw, Poland. Three measurements were performed using two semantic differentials – two weeks before the workshop, one day, and three months afterward. Fifty high school students in the workshop group and forty-three students in the control group took part in the study. After the workshop, people with intellectual disability were perceived as more calm, compliant, and adult, and this change was not observed in the control group. The picture of people with ID after the workshop may probably have been even more complex than before. However, the study focuses on a specific intervention and does not include data about other, similar meetings led in another school and by other self-advocates. It is worthy to design anti-discriminatory workshops led by the self-advocates to impact the perceptions of people with intellectual disability. The particular intervention would benefit from alterations. Workshops performed by self-advocates with intellectual disability may be promising in terms of limiting stereotype formation in target groups of workshops. This research fills the gap in the longitudinal studies on the changes in the impressions about people with intellectual disability following an intervention based on personal contact.

Citations

Authors (2)