Disabling Prejudice: A Case Study of Images of Paralympic Athletes and Attitudes Toward People With Disabilities

Abstract

Part of the goal of the International Paralympic Committee is to “touch the heart of all people for a more equitable society” by exposing people to adaptive sports, with the goal of improving public views toward people with disabilities. The authors hypothesized that exposure to parasocial contact with images of athletes with disabilities could lead to a change in attitude during the formation of social identity, disrupting the tendency to view the population of individuals with physical disabilities as “other. ” This case study found that viewing a documentary of a Paralympic sprinter produced in the same style as an Olympic feature appeared to affect the emotional components of attitude formation, especially when compared with respondents who viewed a comparable documentary about an able-bodied athlete. These findings are of interest to proponents of adaptive sports, producers of adaptive-sports media, and marketers who use athletes with disabilities in advertising campaigns.

Improving Latino/a American students’ attitudes toward persons with disabilities and use of live theater

“…Positive emotion of PWDs can impact attitudes toward PWDs (Suggs & Guthrie, 2017). Some studies (Chebat & Slusarczyk, 2005;Donada & Nogatchewsky, 2009) have shown that an intervention that evoked positive emotions resulted in positive attitudes toward PWDs.…”

Promote the “wow”: (mis)representation, perception and reception of media promotion on wheelchair rugby

“…, 2018; Cottingham et al. , 2014; Suggs and Guthrie, 2017) and can positively influence spectating intention, especially for those unfamiliar with disability sport (Yamashita and Muneda, 2019).…”

“…This balanced marketing rationale was recommended in previous research on disability sport practitioners' promotion strategies (Cottingham et al, 2013(Cottingham et al, , 2015a, and based on the knowledge that spectators internalize the athleticism versus supercrip narrative differently (Byon et al, 2010;Chatfield and Cottingham, 2017;Cottingham et al, 2015a). Notwithstanding, inspiration does elicit positive responses from consumers (Bartsch et al, 2018;Cottingham et al, 2014;Suggs and Guthrie, 2017) and can positively influence spectating intention, especially for those unfamiliar with disability sport (Yamashita and Muneda, 2019).…”

Newspaper Coverage of Paralympic Athletes: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis

“…One of the goals of the International Paralympic Committee is to “touch the heart of all people for a more equitable society” by exposing people to adaptive sports, with the goal of improving the public perception of disabled persons (Suggs & Guthrie, 2017, p. 258). Suggs and Guthrie (2017) added that “. .…”