Exploring the attitudes and knowledge of support workers towards individuals with intellectual disabilities

Background: The aim of this study is to explore support workers’ attitudes and knowledge towards individuals with intellectual disabilities (IDs) to see whether a new attitude scale needs to be developed.
Method: Support workers from a charitable organization located in the West Midlands in the United Kingdom participated in one of four focus groups conducted in late 2013. Thematic analysis was then conducted which identified the emergent themes from the focus groups.
Results: Five themes emerged from the analysis, namely, discrimination of people with IDs, attitude change, impacts of integration, their role as a carer and the impact of training. Only one theme, ‘the impacts of integration’, is clearly represented in current attitude scales; ‘their role as a carer’ and ‘discrimination of people with IDs’ are partially represented.
Conclusion: These results suggest that current attitude scales do not accurately measure the attitudes of support workers; therefore, a modified attitude scale could be developed to incorporate findings from this study.