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Children's willingness to share activities with a physically handicapped peer: am I more willing than my classmates?
S B Morgan1, A A Bieberich, M Walker
1Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, Tennessee 38152, USA. s.morgan@mail.psyc.memphis.edu
Objective:
To examine factors affecting children's willingness to share activities with a peer presented as physically handicapped.
Method:
Participants were 120 elementary school children randomly assigned to view a video of an ambulatory child or the same child in a wheelchair. They rated, on the Shared Activities Questionnaire (SAQ), their own willingness (SAQ-Self) and their perceptions of classmates' willingness (SAQ-Others) to participate in activities with the child.
Results:
SAQ-Self ratings were consistently higher for the peer in the wheelchair. On the SAQ-Others, differences favoring the child in the wheelchair disappeared, and ratings of this child were lower than SAQ-Self ratings. No interactions were found between ambulation status and age or rater gender or preference for type of shared activity.
Conclusions:
Children showed highly positive intentions toward a peer in a wheelchair, but intentions attributed to classmates were less positive, which suggests "social desirability" influenced their own ratings.