Hierarchies of preference by elite athletes with impairments toward other athletes with impairments were examined by administering the Athletes With Impairments Attitude Survey (AWIAS) to 138 members of the United States Disabled Sports Team as they were traveling to the 1992 Paralympic Games. The AWIAS uses 12 statements concerning social and sport relationships to measure social distance from a particular impairment group. Five groups of athletes participated—athletes with amputations, cerebral palsy, dwarfism or les autres, paraplegia or quadriplegia, and visual impairment—with each participant filling out a separate survey for the four impairment groups other than his or her own. For all groups combined, the participants’ responses toward other impairment groups, ordered from most to least favorable attitudes, were amputations, les autres, para/quadriplegia, visual impairment, and cerebral palsy. The preference hierarchies for individual groups were very similar to this overall pattern.

This report detailed the reliability of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory when the test statements were presented verbally and in the traditional manner to undergraduates, 19 men and 17 women, who were physical education majors. In the standardized manner subjects read the statements silently to themselves; in the other administration statements were read aloud. The inventory then was administered twice verbally to 15 elite visually impaired women athletes. Both the state and trait subscales of this inventory are reliable if presented across or within modalities. The inventory, when presented verbally, might be appropriately used by visually impaired athletes in psychological preparation prior to competition.

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The test-retest reliabilities of the Profile of Mood States when items were read aloud on consecutive days to 15 nationally ranked visually impaired athletes ranged from .78 to .95, so the scale can be used with visually impaired athletes who cannot complete the profile in the traditional written manner.