Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale

This scale was developed by Lindsay Gething, a professor in the Nursing Research Centre in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, and a member of the Australian Psychological Society. Gething developed the IDP for Australian setting to assess discomfort in social interaction which is suggested to reflect reactions associated with non-accepting or negative attitudes towards people with disabilities (Gething, 1994).

Though IDP was developed and primarily tested in Australia, the scale has been translated into four languages and tested in nine different countries. It has also been tested as part of a battery of research scales designed to assess attitudes towards people with disabilities (Daruwalla and Darcy, 2005).

Gething (1994) defined Interaction with Disabled Persons Scale as paper-and-pencil report measure stated in the first person. It asks respondents to rate how much of each of a series of twenty statements fit their own reactions when meeting a person with disability. It is an instrument comprising 20 items that are rated on a six point scale (ranging from ‘‘strongly agree’’ to ‘‘strongly disagree’’, with no midpoint or neutral point).   

IDP measures attitudes at a personal level and is based on the assumption that negative attitudes are reflections of the subjects’ lack of association with the object and that this lack of information or strangeness engenders feelings of uncertainty and anxiety (Gething 1993). This was developed to address criticism that the ATDP is written at the societal level and was designed specifically as a unidimensional measure of the overall attitude toward individuals with disabilities. IDP was instead developed to measure attitudes at the individual level of analysis. It describes how a given rater feels about a particular person with disability in a certain situation (Haskell,2010).  

The majority of statements in IDP are constructed in such a way that an agreement response reflects relative discomfort in social interaction. A higher Total Score indicates more discomfort in social interaction toward persons with disabilities, thus reflect negative attitudes toward them.

Moreover, as both the ATDP and IDP scales are intended to measure attitudes toward persons with disabilities, Gething (1994) predicted that significant associations exist between the their scores. Since the direction of the scoring is reversed for the two scales, significant negative relationships could be revealed.