Experimental Tests of Public Support for Disability Policy

Despite the right of disabled people to full social and economic inclusion, many face multiple day-to-day and systemic challenges. These include but are not limited to additional expenses, access to housing, and everyday accessibility difficulties. Surveys show the general public hold positive attitudes towards policies that seek to enable disabled people to overcome these challenges, but standard survey methods are susceptible to response biases that may overestimate this support.

The ESRI through a partnership programme with the NDA conduced a survey using a number of indirect experimental methods to measure attitudes to disability including list experiments and policy frames to determine the extent of bias in direct methods and the changes in attitudes as the trade offs in policy options are made explicit.