Attitudes of college students toward sexual behavior of disabled persons

Empirical data on attitudes toward sexual behavior of disabled persons were gathered from a written, sentence-completion task in which 110 college students engaged. The task consisted of 36 sentence stubs, 18 of which probed attitudes toward sex. To facilitate expression of attitudes rather than values, respondents were instructed to respond rapidly with the first thoughts that came to mind. Responses were scored as positive or negative. Negative responders took significantly less time to complete the sentences than did positive responders. The X2 comparisons of negative responses to 5 pairs of parallel sentence stubs concerned with aspects of sex in general and the same aspects of sex in disabled women yielded statistically significant differences. Four of those differences showed more disapproval of sex for the disabled than for the able-bodied. The 5th difference indicated greater tolerance of homosexual play among disabled girls. On 9 of the 13 sentence stubs concerned with sex and disability, at least 43% of all participants gave negative responses. Similarly, order analysis disclosed that 9 of 10 aspects of sex viewed most negatively were related to sexual behavior by the disabled. It was concluded that attitudes in the sexual revolution have not as yet embraced the disabled even among college students.