Originally published here.

The full inclusion of people with disabilities means that all of them are provided with the same conditions to function in society, including the right to make decisions about their lives, the possibility of starting a family or non-discriminatory access to workplaces. This is stated, among others, in the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [1] adopted in 2006 by the United Nations and ratified by all European Union countries. Unfortunately, very often these provisions are not respected in practice, since the employment rate for this group of people is still very low [2,3].

According to the results of the most recent comprehensive European research on the situation of people with disabilities, in most European countries the difference between the employment rate of people with disabilities aged 15–64 and those without disabilities was 20 percentage points [4]. The differences at the level of 20–40 percentage points to the disadvantage of people with disabilities are also indicated in the latest OECD report dedicated to groups which find themselves in an unfavorable situation on the labor market [5].

Moreover, in many European countries, especially in post-communist ones, people with disabilities working according to their level of education are still a rare phenomenon [6,7]. The same is true of the possibility of full functioning in the public space for this group of people [8]. This situation is largely influenced by attitudes towards people with disabilities presented in mass culture which may promote prejudices and stereotypes towards this group or openness and the right to normality for everyone.

Semiotic research is very well suited to the analysis of content in public discourse, in which existing texts are analyzed, i.e., both written text and images, signs, symbols, films, commercials or reportages [9]. In semiotic research, the concept of Greimas’s semiotic square could be used, according to which the meaning and value in a specific culture are generated by a place in the structure formed by the relations of binary opposites (e.g., good—bad) and the contradictory relations that complement them (e.g., not-bad—not-good) [10,11].

An example of a semiotic study relating to the perception of people with disabilities in popular culture is the study that was conducted at our request in 2018 by a company specialized in this type of research to evaluate the situation in Poland [7]. The subject of the study covered cultural texts that mainly came from Poland, as well as from other countries. The company analyzed materials mostly from 2016–2018, including over 3000 press releases, about 100 films, 700 texts from the Internet, and several dozen Polish and foreign advertisements.

According to the results of the semiotic research, in Polish mass culture a person with a disability is mainly portrayed as a hero struggling with everyday functioning despite their disability/handicap; fighting for a better life; or being an excluded, weak person, in need of help from others, dependent on the support of the state and their loved ones. To a very small extent and slowly, under the influence of cultural changes, we can notice people with disabilities in the public space, aware of their rights and possibilities, treating disability as a feature distinguishing them from others. In Polish public discourse, disability is rarely associated with normal family and professional life [7].

The results of the semiotic research in relation to Polish mass culture inspired us to check the differentiation in the perception of the issue of disability due to demographic and professional characteristics of respondents in an international study on the representative samples of respondents from eight European countries. In the literature on the subject, there are many examples of scientific research on attitudes towards people with disabilities and methods of measuring them [12–14].

In studies in which the importance of demographic and professional characteristics for the perception of disability was analyzed [15,16], it was found, among others, that men represent more discriminatory attitudes towards people with disabilities than women; women appear to have more understanding about the need to adapt working conditions to the needs of people with disabilities, whereas better educated and younger participants respond to people with disabilities better than less educated and elderly ones. Previous studies indicated that elderly people assess the acceptance of motor and sensory disability in the workplace definitely better than the representatives of younger generations, just like people with higher education compared to those less educated. Young people, on the other hand, perceive the acceptance of mental disorders in a definitely more positive way than older employees [17].

Two research questions were formulated:

The first research question: Does the perception of the of functioning of people with disabilities in society differ due to demographic and professional characteristics and respondent’s knowledge of the issues? In other words: Do the representatives of different groups perceive the striving for normality in the functioning of people with disabilities differently, and do these differences result more from demographic or professional characteristics, or the level of knowledge of the subject?

The second research question: Is it possible to indicate demographic and professional characteristics and the elements of respondent’s knowledge of the subject which contribute to a much greater openness towards people with disabilities in the workplace? In other words: Is it possible to appoint an ambassador of people with disabilities in the workplace? This is particularly important when planning to employ people with disabilities in an entity where such people have not worked so far.

In the article we analyzed the impact of selected demographic, professional and experience-related characteristics on the social perception of people with disabilities and the assessment of the situation in the country in terms of openness to people with disabilities. The characteristics that differentiate opinions most strongly in this respect are age, sex and experience in the area of disability, whereas the place of residence seems to have the least influence. Using logistic regression analysis, we managed to identify the characteristics of the ambassador of people with disabilities in the workplace—a person displaying greater openness towards people with disabilities and conviction of the possibilities of using their potential. We have also distinguished five characteristics important from this point of view, which has not only a cognitive aspect, but also practical significance for management, especially in entities that are about to decide to employ people with disabilities and have had no such experience before. In the studies conducted so far, differences between specific countries have not been taken into account. This particularly refers to cultural differences that may influence and bias the results of research carried out on international samples. This issue is so important that it deserves a separate publication, and we decided to focus on this aspect in our subsequent research. Nevertheless, the aim of our article was to show possible differences between the answers given by respondents with various demographic or professional characteristics, regardless of the cultural differences of the countries they come from. It is worth noting that the differences in the answers of female and male respondents, regardless of the country of origin, are also indicated in research carried out, among others, by G. Hofstede, who stated that the answers given to the same questions by men and women were regularly different [48]. In subsequent studies, it would be interesting to analyze the significance of the identified characteristics of the ambassador in each country separately.

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