Development and Standardisation of a Scale on Attitude towards Persons with Intellectual Disabilities-AT-PID

Page: 449-454
Raheemudheen P.K. and Baby Shari P.A. (Department of Psychology, University of Calicut, Malappuram, Kerala)

Attitude of community members toward the person with intellectual disability affect the social life and community integration person with intellectual disability. Their Negative attitudes toward people with intellectual disabilities have remained relevant as these would act as a barrier to social, educational, and vocational integration as a result of discrimination and stigma. The objective of the present study is to develop and standardize a scale to understand community member’s attitudes toward person with intellectual disability. The Attitude towards person with intellectual disability scale(AT-PIDS), consisting 36 items was administered to 360 participants from community members for pilot study and for finding factor structure through EFA. Another sample of 400 persons attempted the final 18 items scale to validate the four-factor structure through CFA. AT-PID yielded a four-factor structure as a first-order factor model of attitude. The four factors are Factor-1: Inclusion; Factor-2: Expectation; Factor-3: Independency; and Factor-4: Acceptance. CFA confirms that F-1, F-2, F-3, and F-4 are the first-order factors and overall attitude towards the person with intellectual disability as the second-order factor. The scale had good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from 0.6 to 0.7 for the four factors and 0.79 for the overall scale. The AT-PIDS can be used to measure the attitude of the general population towards the intellectually disabled, allows comparisons over time for target service provision and public awareness programmes, and helps develop various intervention strategies for de-stigmatising ID