Attitudes towards people with intellectual disabilities. Commentary on “Stereotypes of people with intellectual disabilities held by university education students” (Beunza-Garcia et al., 2023)

We are researchers with and without intellectual disabilities, who work together to learn from the experiences of people with disabilities. Karen Fisher works at the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales Sydney. Gavin Burner advises researchers about the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities. Sally Robinson works at Flinders University. The three of us discussed the article by Beunza-García et al. (Citation2023) so we could understand how it fits with our research about changing attitudes.

The Beunza-García et al. (Citation2023) study found that attitudes of university students studying how become teachers were generally positive. The study tested attitudes by asking students to use words to describe people with intellectual disabilities. Most of the words they used were positive. The results showed no measured differences between students with or without family members with intellectual disabilities.

These results are interesting because they are different from most research about how to change attitudes...