Development and validation of the Intellectual Disability Literacy Scale for assessment of knowledge, beliefs and attitudes to intellectual disability

作者：Scior Katrina^*; Furnham Adrian

来源：Research in Developmental Disabilities, 2011, 32(5): 1530-1541.

DOI：10.1016/j.ridd.2011.01.044

• Intellectual disability
• Lay people
• Knowledge
• Beliefs
• Attitudes
• Social distance
• Stigma

Research into the general public's responses to individuals with intellectual disabilities has been dominated by attitudinal research: While this approach has unquestionably generated useful findings, it ignores important aspects, such as lay knowledge, explanatory models and beliefs about suitable interventions that can produce a multifaceted understanding of public responses. This paper describes the development of a measure designed to assess respondents' intellectual disability literacy. Following a pilot with 114 participants, the IDLS was revised and then completed by 1376 members of the public (aged 18-78 years) from diverse cultural backgrounds. The measure was able to distinguish respondents who showed good intellectual disability literacy. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed four causal beliefs factors (adversity, biomedical: fate, environment) that accounted for 55% of the variance and three intervention beliefs factors (lifestyle, expert help, religion/spiritual,) that explained 52% of the variance. Test-retest reliability for these factors was good for all ethnic groups. The four-item social distance scale had good internal consistency for all ethnic groups and acceptable concurrent validity. The IDLS is a useful new tool to evaluate knowledge, beliefs and social distance to intellectual disability in lay people, is suitable for cross-cultural research-and allows comparison of intellectual disability and mental health literacy in any given population.

• 出版日期2011-10