This article is a work in progress.
We are supported in this work by an advisory group comprising predominantly people with lived experience of disability. You will see some of their experience reflected on this page. We are in the process of seeking a broader range of experiences reflecting more of the diversity of disability in Australia.
Mapping public thinking to shift culture on disability in Australia
Changing attitudes towards disability is a crucial driver of meaningful and sustained change towards a truly inclusive society.
Despite calls for change and efforts by many to better understand what people think about disability, harmful attitudes endure in Australia.
To change the status quo, we need to dig deeper and interrogate how Australians currently think about disability.
“Compelling work in other areas suggests that the key to developing effective attitude change at scale is to identify how people think rather than what they think.”
By focusing on the how we can better identify obstacles preventing Australians from thinking about disability in a holistic and inclusive way.
What are we doing to change community attitudes?
The Achieve Foundation has partnered with the FrameWorks Institute to develop an evidence-based approach to creating change that counters ableist attitudes that remain dominant in Australian culture.
What is abelism?
Ableism is a way of thinking or behaving, intentionally or otherwise, that discriminates against or systemically oppresses people with disabilities.
Ableism might look like:
Believing that people with disabilities have fewer valuable contributions to make to the world, than those without disabilities.
Telling a person they don’t look disabled as a compliment.
Refusing to respect the person with disability’s preferred descriptors such as “Deaf” vs “deaf person”, “person that uses a mobility aid” or using “Autistic person” rather than “person with Autism”.
Assuming someone can ‘overcome’ their disability if they just try hard enough.
The FrameWorks Institute is a global leader in using communications as a driver for social change. They have pioneered a research methodology to study public mindsets and the strategies that shift them. This approach to reframing has been driving change at scale on multiple issues in countries around the world for 25 years.
What is reframing?
Reframing is about changing the way we communicate about an issue to change the way that people think and talk. This usually involves engaging in a framing context as there are always more than one frame at play on a given social issue.
Source - FrameWorks Institute
Reframing an issue can change both how people think and act. Reframing messages and advancing new narratives is a vital part of creating a more inclusive society for people with disability.
The purpose of this project is to conduct research and implement new framing and communication strategies across Australia through workplaces and local communities to, over time, create a deep and sustained shift in Australian culture.
Together we are committed to close consultation with the disability community and have engaged leaders and change makers in this sector to partner and work alongside us in this endeavour.
This project has three phases. In the first phase, we have pulled together the key ideas that those in the disability community want to see change and have deeply examined the cultural mindsets that shape how Australians think about disability and inclusion. These can be thought of as point A (where we are today) and point B (our goal).
The findings from this first phase will be used to develop a suite of framing and communication strategies that can be used to bring about more inclusive mindsets towards disability in the community.
Findings from the first phase
This summary article presents themes that emerged from in-depth interviews undertaken with a diverse group of Australians. This included people with disability, and members of the public across a broad range of demographics.
The core findings from these interviews were tested and substantiated by disability experts and leaders in Australia.
Findings show clearly that harmful ways of thinking about disability persist among Australian communities and block efforts to create a more inclusive society.
This brings into sharp focus the need to shift these patterns of thinking and begins to suggest specific strategies that can be used to do so.
Leaders and change makers in the disability community
The Achieve Foundation upholds that people with disability must be at the forefront of all work that relates to disability. It has been of critical importance to us to engage people with disability as partners and we have built this project together.
We firmly endorse the expertise of leaders and change makers throughout the Australian disability community. As such, members of this community have been involved in the design and review of the research through at-length conversations, consultations, and participation in an advisory panel.
The expertise and knowledge these individuals bring to the table has been instrumental to our methodology in developing this project and will continue to be central as we move forward.
How are we going about our work?
The project has three distinct phases. This summary article presents findings from phase one (Discovery) and analyses Australians’ current thinking about disability to reveal ways that we can begin to shift it.
Having established a foundational understanding of mindsets about disability, the themes presented here will inform phase two of the project (Development and Testing), which involves developing and testing a toolkit of framing and narrative strategies that can be used by a wide range of messengers to shift public thinking about disability. During phase three (Implementation and Evaluation), we will implement these strategies through a range of tools and evaluate their impact on how Australians think and act on disability issues.
We are aiming to complete phase two by late 2024.
Phase 1
Discovery
The discovery phase comprised of two parts:
Stage 1. Where are we going?
We worked in close consultation with disability experts and the literature from the sector to determine the core ideas that we want to shift thinking towards.
Stage 2. Where are we now?
We conducted in-depth interviews with the Australian public to determine what mindsets underpin how people think about disability in Australia today. We designed these interviews and reviewed findings with disability leaders in Australia.
Phase 2
Framing and communication strategies - development and testing
Phase 1 findings will form the basis of development and testing of framing and communication strategies. These will be tested through a range of methods (such as experimental surveys and on-the-street interviews) to determine their effectiveness in shifting people’s thinking about disability.
Phase 3
Implementation and evaluation
After development and testing, the suite of tools and communication strategies will be rolled out to the Australian public through various channels including public and private sector partnerships. We will monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the communication strategies in changing attitudes and behaviours at scale.
Project methodology: How we conducted our research
We conducted interviews
We collected 600 hours of discourse through thirty in-depth interviews with members of the Australian public. This helped us understand not just what Australians think about disability, but how they think. These interviews used a flexible script and open-ended questions, designed to draw out open dialogue with the participants.
The methodology used in this research has been tested internationally for over two decades. The sample size of 30 participants that represent diversity across a number of demographic groups ensure that we are finding patterns of thinking that are shared across Australian culture. In projects of this nature, 30 interviews, yielding 600 hours of discourse, are enough to reach a saturation point where additional data provide no new insights into the cultural models of disability and inclusion in Australia.
D’Andrade, R. “Some Methods for Studying Cultural Cognitive Structures,” in Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods, ed. Quinn, N. 2006: 99-100); Kendall-Taylor, N. 2012. “Conflicting Mindsets of Mind: Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understandings of Child Mental Health. Science Communication, 34 (6): 701.
We analysed the interviews
Once conducted, we analysed the 600 hours of interview data to derive key themes and insights.
We evaluated findings with leaders in the disability community
Once we had extracted key themes through our in-depth analysis, we consulted closely with our project advisory panel. Most members of this panel have lived experience of disability as well as being leaders in the Australian disability community.
We also individually reached out to experts with and without disability to have in-depth conversations about the findings.
We used feedback to develop insights
Using the feedback received from leaders with disability we arrived at a set of key insights that will be used as the foundation for project phases two and three.
Five problematic mindsets about disability that need to shift
The following insights represent views expressed by members of the public who participated in a series of interviews.
To best give context to these findings we encourage you to refer to the project’s methodology overview.
These findings will be used to develop framing and communication strategies to shift problematic attitudes towards people with disabilities in Australia.
We would like to acknowledge that some of these findings may be confronting or distressing. If you experience distress, you can call the National Counselling and Referral Service - Disability on 1800 421 468. This service provides emotional support, referrals or information to people living with disability and their supporters, carers and advocates. All calls are confidential.
We emphasise the ‘problematic mindsets’ that emerged from the analysis do not reflect the views and opinions of The Achieve Foundation or those of our advisors, but rather the findings of our research.
We encourage you to engage with us as we continue with this work and move towards a more fruitful dialogue that creates meaningful change.
Graeme Innes
Problematic Mindset 1
In order to be fully human a person must have certain physical, mental, and affective abilities
Within Australian society there exists a mindset that there are a set of natural preconditions that make a human, human.
Participants expressed the following three assumptions of what makes a person fully human.
A person is able to take care of their physiological needs without support.
A person has the ability to learn in a linear and standardised manner.
A person can form social relationships and express emotions in a standardised manner.
“I went to a special school until year 11. The teachers there were passionate and committed, and the resources excellent. But none of the people in my peer group, I have no friends in my peer group before the age of 16 who lived in the same suburb as me. It’s funny how that comes back at you later in your life. People in their older live see friends that they got to know at school. I don’t have that friendship.”
– Graeme Innes –
Why this mindset is problematic
Under these assumptions a person who does not meet these criteria is not ‘fully human’.
This creates a binary distinction between people categorised as ‘normal’ and full humans, and people with disability who are not.
This leads to a social separation between those with disabilities and those without.
To have and use a set of criteria of what it means to be ‘fully human’, that many people with disability do not meet, disregards the diversity of the human experience and dehumanizes people with disability.
People with disabilities are fully human.
Emma Bennison
Problematic Mindset 2
An individual’s social value is determined by their economic productivity
Our findings showed a mindset in which people’s value to society is understood in terms of their economic productivity and financially self-sufficiency.
Using this mindset, the perceived value of a person with disability is evaluated by comparing their ability to contribute economically to society against the social resources they access and burden they are seen to pose.
Furthermore, there is an assumption that the allocating resources to support people with disability takes social supports away from others in society who would benefit from them, compounding the negative effect of this mindset.
"Quite frequently when I go into meetings with a sighted colleague, there's an assumption that the sighted colleague is the leader and I am the admin support. It is just assumed that a person with disability couldn't possibly be a safe pair of hands to lead an organisation."
– Emma Bennison –
Why this mindset is problematic
This way of thinking can cause people to underestimate a person with disability’s capability to contribute to society.
To assume that paid employment is the only source of social value is problematic as it overlooks the other sources of value of people regardless of their economic contributions.
Furthermore it mistakenly frames resource and financial expenditure on people with disabilities as inherently burdensome and as a mark against their social value.
These attitudes can reinforce negative self-perceptions of people with disabilities as they strive to live up to impractical expectations.
People with disabilities are more than our economic productivity.
Problematic Mindset 3
Social acceptance and inclusion is an individual choice
Findings showed that many Australians reason that social inclusion is about individual members of society making the decision to accept members of society with disability—that this is an issue of individual choice.
This mindset and its focus on the power of individual choice leads people to believe being accepted is also a matter of individual will and that a person currently excluded can achieve inclusion if they try hard enough.
“If I’m going through an airport, and I know because I do it every week, that I can go through the scanner and not have to be patted down. The default is I have to be patted down. If I challenge that, I’m the one who’s causing the problem”
– Graeme Innes –
Why this mindset is problematic
Emphasising personal responsibility for accepting people with disability is a highly individualistic view on how to achieve inclusion and ignores the role of systems and structures in society that actively exclude, or fail to accept, people with disability.
The emphasis on individual effort and willpower to gaining acceptance from others reinforces notions of ableism. When it is a person’s own responsibility to achieve inclusion, the responsibility of society (and government) fades from view and the pressure for change is weakened.
This mindset forces people with disability to ‘overcome’ obstacles created by an unaccommodating society.
While changing individual attitudes is important, this mindset obscures the fact that full inclusion cannot be achieved if structural barriers are not removed.
Social inclusion is a whole of society responsibility.
Jessica Horner. Photo by Graham Horner.
Problematic Mindset 4
Disability is about visibly observable limitations
We found that many Australians think of disability in terms of what is visibly observable and assume that inclusion, therefore, is about addressing physical dimensions of the environment that limit access and participation.
This leads Australians’ discussion of inclusion to focus on things like building ramps or providing accessible swings in a playground.
This assumption also leads people to understand inclusion as being about having individuals with visible disabilities represented in the public sphere.
“I frequently find myself having to justify or explain my disabilities because they are not immediately apparent, or visible. More than once I’ve been in a situation while trying to access support services where, having lost consciousness in the interview, I have been told “that’s helpful, we have evidence now”. While I am now in a position where I am more able to advocate for myself and for others, the constant need to “prove” my disability continues to be a disappointing and exhausting reality. My aspiration is that one day, the constant justification of our lived realities as people with non-apparent disabilities will no longer be necessary to receive dignity and support.”
– Jessica Horner –
Why this mindset is problematic
By focusing on the need to make adjustments to physical space and seeing these adjustments as largely having been made, Australians mistakenly believe that people with disabilities are already included in society.
This is problematic as these small accommodations fall well short of and do not represent a holistic view of inclusion.
Often these small changes are helpful for some, but do not allow for full social participation and meaningful inclusion for people with disabilities.
Furthermore, this view of accessibility fails to consider the needs of Australians living with non-apparent disabilities such as cognitive or psychosocial disabilities and neurodivergence.
True inclusion goes beyond that which is easily observable.
Problematic Mindset 5
We’ve come so far…
Our research found that members of the public assess current states of inclusion by comparing and contrasting present day to an even more highly problematic past.
This might come in the form of comparing past institutionalisation of people with disabilities with the relative level of acceptance that exists in the present.
Using this mindset, the fact that explicit stigmatisation of people with disability is no longer considered socially acceptable is seen as evidence of inclusiveness of Australian society.
People believe that progress made on disability is proof that we have solved our problems and that current society represents true inclusivity. In short, that progress means the job is done.
"It's a bit like the International Day, isn't it? You have it on the 3rd of December. [Organisations] say "Right we've done that for the year. If we've celebrated the International Day, we've done our job. Tick." But if you look at their employment record, they won't even be able to tell you if they employ a person with disability."
– Emma Bennison –
Why this mindset is problematic
Whilst it is important to recognise the progress made in Australian society, it’s essential to recognize that people with disabilities are still marginalised in Australia and that there remains significant progress ahead.
Furthermore, this mindset casts increased allocation of money for services and supports for people with disabilities as problem solved and decreases public pressure around the need for more robust supports and increased public spending to move towards full inclusion.
We have not reached the finish line yet when it comes to disability inclusion.
Where do we go from here?
What are the mindsets that cause marginalisation in public thinking? Our findings show a collection of mindsets about human ability and societal value, as well as ideas about acceptance, inclusion and social progress, that we can use to make sense of how to reframe disability and inclusion in Australia. An effective reframing strategy must expand how people think about disability, systemic change, and what full inclusion looks like.
The insights in this summary article are a first step to shifting public thinking around disability and inclusion in Australia. Additional research is needed to design and test specific tools and strategies that can help shift public thinking about people living with disability and build support for policies that promote inclusion. The findings laid out here can help reframe the conversation about disability and build support for systemic change to fully include people living with disability in Australian society.
The ideas and insights presented here will serve as the foundation as we develop the tools that will change attitudes about disability. These tools will undergo comprehensive testing with much larger cohorts. It is our goal that this one-of-a-kind project will be implemented nationally to make Australia to a more inclusive society.
Acknowledgements
Writing: Patrick O’Shea, Belle Tukin, Jessica Horner.
Photography: Jessica Horner, Graham Horner.
Digital Production: Blend Creative, a socially inclusive design studio.