The Effects of Contact With and Knowledge About Children With Disabilities on Peers’ Attitudes: A Review Study

Children with disabilities often experience difficulties in their social participation within inclusive classrooms. Peers’ attitudes toward children with disabilities are seen as a barrier to their social participation (e.g., Antonak & Livneh, 2000), and are predominantly neutral to negative (De Boer, Pijl, & Minnaert, 2012). This stresses the need for class wide interventions to promote peers’ attitudes through which the social participation can be promoted as well. Two intervention components appear to be of relevance in promoting peers’ attitudes: (1) improving the quality of contact between children with and without disabilities and (2) providing knowledge about children with disabilities. The well-known and much-used Contact Theory (Allport, 1954) provides the rationale for these components. The Contact theory poses that contact which allows for acquaintance and chances to exchange knowledge would promote attitudes. Several review studies and meta-analyses have been conducted confirming the importance of the contact component (e.g., MacMillan et al., 2014; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). However, no overview of the literature exists including both the contact and knowledge component. Furthermore, no specific attention has been given to the domain of inclusive education and children with disabilities so far. This study has been set up to bridge this gap in knowledge. A comprehensive search was conducted across multiple databases. Studies were included if they measured children’s attitudes towards disability and children’s contact with people with disabilities or their knowledge about disabilities. The level of evidence of the relationship between contact/knowledge and peers’ attitudes was examined by looking at the methodological quality of each study. As this is study is still ongoing, no results can be reported in this abstract. At the ECER, the first results will be discussed during this presentation.