The Social Effects of Ability-based School Integration

Contact Theory (Allport, 1954) was used as foundation to develop an Educational Experience Questionnaire (EEQ), which was designed to operationalize the tenets of Contact Theory based on the perceptions of nondisabled students who experienced intergroup contact with students who have disabilities in primary and secondary schools, as a predictor of attitudes toward persons who have disabilities. A factor analysis of the EEQ yielded a reasonable four-factor structure that was similar across primary/secondary and developmental/physical disabilities domains. The EEQ was administered to a sample of 444 college students along with the NEO-FFI, the Scale of Attitudes toward Disabled Persons, the Mental Retardation Attitudes Inventory, the Marlowe-Crowne Socialdesirability Scale, and demographic questions. Correlational analyses found a strong relationship between the quality of intergroup contact in ability-integrated educational environments and long-term attitudes toward persons who have disabilities. Classification and Regression Tree (CART) analyses revealed evidence of cumulative, negative David R. Parker cumulative, compensatory, and reverse compensatory effects among predictor variables, indicating that there are a variety of complex interactions between the conditions of intergroup contact and the characteristics of the individual. The importance of adequately operationalizing the conditions of contact in school environments and the use of CART to assess the social outcomes of educational practices are discussed.