Attitudes towards disabilities and its influence on the perception of inclusion by higher education students

Inclusive education has to face the needs of all student community members, building a system capable of respecting the particularity of every individual. In this context, it becomes relevant the subject of the attitudes from people who share a common place with diversity, and the strengthening of inclusion in higher education institutions. This study presents a quantitative/transversal approach, and sets the following objectives: to analyze, through hypothesis contrast, the most relevant attribute variables that have an influence upon attitudes towards disability and the perception about inclusive culture, normativity and practices in students from higher education institution, to determine which difference is established between the students and explore how they group together by means of Cluster Analysis. In order to achieve this purpose, we measure via survey the perceptions in a group of 1905 students from higher education. Results obtained from T test, variance analysis and cluster analysis show that gender, academic field and contact with disability are the most relevant variables to explain attitudes.