Original Article
Attitudes towards motherhood of women with physical versus psychiatric disabilities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dhjo.2018.05.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Women with disabilities may face social negative attitudes with regard to their being mothers. In addition, attitudes toward different disabilities form a hierarchy, with more positive attitudes being displayed toward persons with physical disabilities than toward persons with psychiatric disabilities.

Objective

Current observational study examined whether the relationship between a woman's type of disability (psychiatric vs. physical) and the social attitude towards her would be moderated by her being presented as a mother.

Method

University students (N = 100) filled out the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale Toward Persons With Disabilities and the Social Distance Scale, after reading one of six randomly assigned fictitious vignettes. The vignettes consisted of a woman with a physical disability/a woman with a psychiatric disability/a woman without a disability, who either was or was not a mother.

Results

Type of disability was found to have a main effect in some attitude domains, suggesting that attitudes toward women with physical disabilities were better than attitudes towards women with psychiatric disabilities. An interaction between type of disability and motherhood was found for the interpersonal distress subscale of the attitudes scale. It was found that when women had physical disabilities, there was no change in attitude towards them regardless of whether they were presented as mothers or not; However, when the target woman had a psychiatric disability, and she was presented as a mother, negative attitudes were generated towards her.

Conclusions

The study demonstrates the existence of a hierarchy of stigmatization and the effect of being a mother on stigmatization.

Section snippets

Participants

One hundred undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate university students from Bar-Ilan University (located in a central area of Israel, near Tel-Aviv) participated in this observational study after they provided written informed consent. Women comprised approximately half of the sample (52%). The mean age for the total sample was 32.24 years (SD = 9.7), and 76% of the sample reported being acquainted with a person with a disability (see Table 1 for a further description of the sample).

Socio-demographic questionnaire

This

Instruments' reliabilities and assessment of possible group differences

In the current study, the Cronbach's alpha of the social distance scale was 0.76, and the Cronbach's alpha of the sub-scales of the attitudes scale ranged between 0.78 and .90.

Chi-square tests of independence indicated no significant differences between participants' characteristics (gender, marital status, religiosity, and parenthood) and between the different test conditions. In addition, no significant differences in participants' ages were found between the six test conditions, a finding

Discussion

Results of the current study support findings from previous research,8,18,38 indicating that individuals from the general population hold negative emotions towards women with any type of disability (physical or psychiatric). This finding demonstrates the stigmatizing beliefs and emotions held by normative individuals towards women with disabilities, who seem to be perceived as asexual beings and as women unable to fulfill traditional gender roles, such as that of wife and mother.39, 40, 41

The

Conclusions

To summarize, the findings of the present study suggest that – with regard to stigma – acquiring the valued social role of motherhood may actually be harmful for women with psychiatric disabilities. Such women already encounter negative social attitudes, and they may encounter even more when they become mothers. It is possible that the stigma towards people with a psychiatric disability is so powerful that when it is challenged – for example, by suggesting that a person with a disability can be

Conflicts of interest

No conflict of interest.

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