The Debbie Project Survey Data

Our research hypothesis was that exposure to a volunteer learning opportunity working with children with disabilities would improve implicit and explicit biases among medical students towards persons with disabilities. The data includes demographic information about participants, scores on the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale Towards Persons with Disabilities (MAS), and scores on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for persons with disabilities. Volunteers were asked to complete this survey one week prior to beginning their volunteering (t1), after 4 months at the end of the intervention (t2), and again 4 months later (t3). The comparison group was comprised of medical students who were not volunteering, and they filled out the survey at t1 and t2. All data was collected and stored by Project Implicit. This was gathered by having all participants fill out an online survey form. To use and interpret the data the files can be transferred to SPSS or similar software to run analyses examining demographics of participants, differences in baseline differences between groups, changes in the MAS and IAT scores at different time points, and differences as to how different groups answered specific MAS questions. The most notable finding was that there was a statistically significant improvement in MAS scores from t1 to t2 among volunteer participants.