Hidden Bias: Social Service Professionals’ Attitudes toward Physical Disability

Implicit social cognition, also known as implicit bias, may impact social work practice. Because social workers commonly work with people with disabilities, it is important to understand more about social service professionals' attitudes about physical disability. By using descriptive and inferential statistical tests to quantitatively analyze secondary 2023 data from social service professionals, including social workers and counselors (n = 5,167), this study found that 70.3 percent of respondents reported having no explicit preference for people with or without physical disabilities, 23.7 percent reported preferring people without physical disabilities explicitly, and 6.0 percent reported preferring people with physical disabilities explicitly. For implicit attitudes, most participants had implicit preference for people without physical disabilities (77.8 percent), 13.7 percent had no implicit preference for people with or without physical disabilities, and 8.5 percent implicitly preferred people with physical disabilities. There was a statistically significant relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes, with most people having discordant explicit and implicit attitudes, often with low levels of explicit bias and high levels of implicit bias. This study also found age, gender, disability, having friends/family with disabilities, education, and political orientation correlated with explicit and implicit disability attitudes. The article ends with a discussion of educational interventions to reduce disability-related implicit bias.