Are Autistic Students More Stigmatized Than Other Types of Neurodiverse College Students?

Background: A growing body of research focuses on assessing attitudes towards autistic college students to identify factors that may contribute to autistic people being less likely than students with most other disabilities to enroll in college, despite often high cognitive potential (Gardiner & Iarocci, 2014; Matthews et., al 2015; Wei et al., 2013; White et al., 2016). Little remains known about the degree to which autism is stigmatized relative to other disorders. Feldman and Crandall (2007) analyzed stigma towards 40 disorders by having participants rate vignettes consisting of a diagnostic label, core characteristics, and common representations of each disorder (e.g., an autistic child). They found that autism was one of the least stigmatized disorders. Heightened perceived rarity, dangerousness, and personal responsibility were associated with greater stigma. Given that their approach to creating vignettes made it impossible to distinguish between stigma arising from core characteristics, labels, and/or commonly co-occurring characteristics, cross-disability research is needed to identify targets of anti-stigma intervention.

Objectives: We compared stigma towards college students with different disorders and examined factors that contribute to stigma towards autism in particular.

Methods: College students from the U.S. (Male = 193, Female = 233) and Lebanon (Male = 86, Female = 98) were randomly assigned to rate labels (e.g., “college student with autism”) or unlabeled vignettes describing 10 disorders (autism, eating disorder, social anxiety, addiction to pain medication, psychopathy, schizophrenia, learning disability, depression, mania, and ADHD). Separate vignettes depicted a withdrawn and a severe form of autism. Students completed an adapted Social Distance Scale (stigma assessment: Bogardus, 1933), a social desirability scale, and rated perceived dangerousness, rarity, and personal responsibility for each disorder.

Results: Only p-values ≤ .001 were considered significant. A repeated-measures analysis with stigma as the dependent variable and condition (label vs. vignette), country, and gender as independent variables revealed main effects of condition (labels were less stigmatized than behaviors) and gender (women endorsed less stigma than men) and interactions between stigma and country and stigma and condition. Across cultures, psychopathy and schizophrenia were the most stigmatized (see Table 1). Stigma towards the label “autism” was relatively low while stigma towards behaviors associated with autism was moderate. The only cross-cultural difference in stigma was toward the label “pain medication addiction”. Regressions were used to examine predictors of stigma towards autism; stigma towards the label “autism” was associated with being male, greater belief that autism is dangerous, lower quality contact with autistic people, and lower autism knowledge. Only lower quality contact with autism was associated with heightened stigma towards the autistic college student vignettes.

Conclusions: Findings suggest that autism is less stigmatized on college campuses than disorders like psychopathy and schizophrenia which may be perceived as dangerous. Indeed, stigma towards the label “autism” was associated with perceived dangerousness. Stigma was consistently related to quality of prior contact with autism, suggesting that interventions which put autistic students into high quality contact with peers are powerful tools for stigma reduction.