Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin

Census data have indicated that persons with disabilities account for approximately one fifth of the adult U.S. pop-ulation (Steinmetz, 2006). Although legislation was passed to help protect persons with disabilities from discrimina-tion in the workplace, disparity still exists within the work-force between persons with and without disabilities. For example in 2008 within the United States, only 39.3 % of noninstitutionalized adult individuals with any type of dis-ability were employed, whereas fully 77.8 % of individu-als without a disability were employed (Erickson, Lee, & von Schrader, 2010). Explanations for the underemployment of individuals with disabilities include a lack of opportunity for a person with a disability to access employment (Fassinger, 2008), misconceptions of both coworkers and employers because of the nature of the disability (Bordieri, Drehmer, & Taylor, 1997; Chan, McMahon, Cheing, Rosenthal, & Bezyak, 2005), and negative employer attitudes (Fabian & Liesener, 2005; Israelite, Swartz, Huynh, & Tocco, 2005). Attempts at addressing these barriers include creating more accessible recruitment and selection strategies (e.g., Job Accommodation Network, 2010), developing reward systems amenable to persons with disabilities (Stone & Colella, 1996), and inves-tigating the underlying processes fostering negative work-place attitudes (Antonak & Livneh, 2000). In the current study our focus was the latter of these three approaches. Namely, we investigated attitude measurement toward persons with disabilities. Recent survey data have indicated that negative attitudes are indeed quite prevalent in the workplace (Dixon, Kruse, & Van Horn, 2003). Antonak and Livneh (2000) have called for disability researchers to utilize “innovative experimental methods and psycho-metrically sound instruments that are reliable, valid, and multidimensional ” (p. 211). The current study modified and further investigated a measure with the potential to satisf