Originally published here.

One of the key elements of sustainable economic development is ensuring that all people function normally in society, and have equal access to employment. Although several years have passed since the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [1] was enacted by the United Nations, the employment rate for this group of people is still much lower in most European and world countries when compared with social demographics [2,3]. Inequalities also relate to access to healthcare [4] or disproportions in the level of future retirement benefits [5], in particular for people with disabilities from older age groups [6]. The results of many scientific studies indicate that one of the reasons for this may be poor knowledge of the specificity of different types of disability in societies, and as a result, an unfavourable social perception of such people. Obtaining remuneration for one’s work instead of 

allowance is more beneficial for both the economy and employees. However, disability stereotypes may cause additional difficulties in finding employment. The literature on the subject includes many examples of research dedicated to, among others, attitudes towards people with disabilities and ways of measuring them [7,8]. In the review of research on employers’ attitudes towards people with disabilities [9], which included 34 studies from 1987–2012, there were three distinguished groups of factors affecting employment: adaptation of people with disabilities in the workplace, work efficiency, and reactions of colleagues as well as employers’ attitudes. Actions undertaken in practice indicate much lower openness to people with disabilities than declared [10]. Many research results seem to confirm that it is the attitude of employers and able-bodied colleagues that is of decisive importance for the success of the adaptation process of people with disabilities in the workplace [11,12]. The negative attitudes of employers constitute the main barrier to employing people with disabilities, which has been confirmed by, among others, research conducted in Sweden [13,14].

For many years, a lot of time has been devoted to developing and improving tools for measuring the perception of people with disabilities in everyday life. What was important in this regard was the work on the development of the Attitudes to Disability Scale (ADS) test [15–17] performed by a team led by M. Power (The World Health Organization Quality of Life Group—WHOQOL Group). The ADS test was created as an auxiliary measure in developing an intercultural tool for measuring the quality of life of people with physical or intellectual disabilities (WHOQOL-DIS). The ADS questionnaire asked respondents about their opinion on disability and disabled people in general. The test consists of sixteen statements related to the perception of the functioning of people with disabilities in society in four main areas (factors): inclusion (items 1–4), discrimination (items 5–8), gains (items 9–12), prospects (items 13–16)—see Table 1. Respondents express their opinions using the 5-point Likert scale, where 1 means “I completely disagree”, and 5 “I completely agree”. The following stages of developing the ADS test were verified in 14 research centres around the world, and the target group included people who experienced disability in some way-people who suffered from disabilities and those who took care of them (e.g., caregivers, therapists). The authors of the scale obtained quite good results in terms of reliability of measurement, although there were noted significant differences depending on the centres where the study was conducted, gender or type of disability. Classical psychometric analyses (based on linear correlations) and those performed with the use of IRT (item response theory) methodology based on the logit analysis made it possible to obtain convergent results in both methods for the same data. The items of the ADS scale presented in Table 1 are formulated as negative statements about people with disabilities. The exception is factor 3 (gains), in which items indicate positive attributes related to disability.

The results of the research obtained using the ADS WHOQOL Group scale have inspired us to design an international survey on representative samples of respondents from eight European countries. The first objective of the survey was to check whether the ADS scale can be used to measure the attitudes of the whole society, and not only of people with disability experience, i.e., people suffering from disabilities and people directly dealing with them (e.g., caregivers, physiotherapists, people from institutions helping the disabled). We also strived to examine whether the same measurement tools can be used in groups of people who experienced disability (as in the work of the WHOQOL Group) and groups of people without such experience. The results confirming this assumption would mean that the representation of the societies of the analyzed countries can be included in the sample while performing analyses. That would be a valuable result extending the possibility of using the ADS questionnaire. The second survey objective was an attempt to translate the results from the ADS scale into the assessment of the perception of people with disabilities in the workplace. To this end, we tried to add a new “work” dimension of statements determining the perception of people with disabilities in the workplace to the ADS scale in an ad hoc manner (see Table 2). These statements were prepared based on the analysis of the results of individual in-depth and group interviews conducted in 2019 on groups of employers, employees with disabilities and persons statutorily supporting the disabled.