Sociological Attitude towards Students with Disabilities - Thesis Example

Often there lies confusion between abnormal students and those confronting severe and multiple disabilities. The reality behind exploring both of them leads us to the same difficulties which abnormal and disabled students face in their day-to-day lives. These difficulties arise in the context of that sociological background which is created for them by our society, due to which their skills instead of improving by providing care, tend to suffer in a number of developmental areas which include motor skills, communication, and language abilities, vision, hearing, and behavioral and intellectual functioning. First, we would explore the real meaning of disabled students.

Being Disabled
Inappropriate terms for disability are often confined to a wheelchair and the mentally handicapped, although sometimes people hastily correct themselves to use other, less judgemental, phrases such as wheelchair user or people with learning difficulties when they saw that the person who is disabled is within earshot. On the positive side, this shows that at least people do make the effort to change their language when that person is around. However, the experience also suggests that society is not fully committed to using appropriate terminology consistently when they still get away with using outdated terms when speaking to other non-disabled people.

Tregaskis mentions in an example that, “I overheard one activity group leader being referred to in patronizing terms by his non-disabled volunteers as the wheelchair lad, and in my own case my support worker was told by an activity leader that, of course, Claire tries her best, but she's very limited…. Interestingly, both of these comments were made by non-Greenways staff, and I can think of a few occasions over the seven months when an in-house member of staff made an inappropriate disabling comment about disabled customers direct to my face. Taken as a whole, the findings reported here do however suggest that initiatives aimed at developing a common language with which disabled and non-disabled people can discuss issues around disability and impairment may meet with resistance, or be treated with lip-service by some non-disabled people”. (Tregaskis, 2004, p. 110)

It is often observed that there lies a strong demarcation between the ways in which society describes wheelchair users as compared with other disabled people. In that recreation setting, wheelchair users are always defined as disabled, whereas all other people with impairments are described as normal or nearly normal. It is clear, that being able to walk is seen as a major indicator of people's ability to take part in sport. At the same time, however, most staff showed little understanding of access issues or impairment effects (Thomas, 1999) that might have a negative impact on ambulant disabled peoples' ability to participate in Centre activities.

“An attitude is a tendency to act towards or against some environmental factor which becomes thereby a positive or negative value. An attitude is an idea charged with emotion, which predisposes a class of actions to a particular class of social situations” (Triandis, 1971, p. 2). An attitude can be:

1. An implicit response
2. Such response can be both anticipatory as well as mediating in reference to patterns of overt responses,
3. It can be evoked by a variety of stimulus patterns as a result of previous learning or of gradients of generalization and discrimination,
4. Attitude is itself cue and drive-producing,
5. Attitude is considered socially significant in the individual's society (Doob, 1967, p. 43).

When it comes to sociological attitudes, it produces a response on the student's side thereby involving emotional functions such as justifying behavior in an inner tense condition. Such responses of handicapped students are measured through various instruments, techniques, or procedures. Three major types of attitude scales have been used to measure attitudes toward handicapped students and are referred to as rating scales are

1. Summated rating scale;
2. Equal-appearing interval scales;
3. Cumulative or Guttman scales.