How do Children and Youth Reason About Excluding Students with Disabilities?

While more students with disabilities are enrolling in institutes of higher education, college experiences can be particularly challenging and isolating. Currently, there is little understanding about how to encourage the inclusion of these students in everyday academic and social activities with their peers. We conducted this study because understanding how non-disabled undergraduates reason about the acceptability of excluding  peers with disabilities may help decrease the marginalization that often accompanies disability in college settings.

Using semi-structured interviews, we examined reasoning patterns in non-disabled undergraduates as they evaluated scenarios in which a student chose to exclude a peer based on their disability status. The scenarios varied in terms of the context of the event, whether or not a grade was at stake, and the disability of the person excluded. In this study, (we focused on autism and learning disabilities (LD). Responses were coded to determine whether the non-disabled students determined that exclusion was acceptable or unacceptable, and the reasons they gave to support their evaluation.

We found that evaluations, and the justifications used to support evaluations, varied as a function of the disability and the context in which exclusion takes place. To highlight a few of the main findings: 1) the exclusion of autistic students was more likely to be considered acceptable than the exclusion of students with LD, 2) exclusion was more likely to be considered acceptable in classroom than in social contexts, 3) family and social experience with either autistic students or students with LD did not predict the participants’ evaluations, and 4) moral and conventional justifications were applied most frequently to explain why exclusion was acceptable.

Autistic college students may be particularly at risk for exclusion because non-disabled college students are less likely to view excluding these students as wrong as compared to the exclusion of students with LD. Additionally, because participants used social convention and moral justifications to indicate the exclusion is acceptable (i.e. “his autism makes him want to be alone all the time, so it would be okay not to invite him to a party for his own good), information about autism  might help these students adjust their thinking about exclusion. Finally, rather than simply increasing the amount of time non-disabled students spend with students with disabilities, specific support to increase the quality of interaction between non-disabled and autistic students and initiatives to support meaningful inclusion in campus activities from disability resource center may be needed.

Bottema-Beutel, K., Turiel, E., DeWitt, M., & Wolfberg, P.J. (2017). To include or not to include: Evaluations and reasoning about the failure to include peers with autism spectrum disorder in elementary students. Autism, 2(1), 51-60.

Bottema-Beutel, K., & Li, Z. (2015). Adolescent judgments and reasoning about the failure to include peers with social disabilities. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 45(6), 1873- 1886.