Employer Attitudes towards Employing People with Disabilities – Developing Two Multilevel Mirrored Scales to Advance Quality of Life

Despite legislature’s opposition to discrimination against people with disabilities (PwD), equality of opportunity is not yet a reality for PwD. Enabling equitable employment prospects is crucial for enhancing the quality of life and well-being of this population. Several scales for assessing employer attitudes toward recruiting PwD have been proposed, but none are adequate. We have thus developed the Motivation to Employ People with Disabilities (MEPD) scale. It comprises two mirrored scales that assess employer attitudes toward hiring PwD, providing a validated tool to identify barriers and facilitate interventions that can expand workforce participation and its associated quality of life benefits for PwD. Based on the analysis of 540 fully completed questionnaires gathered through an online panel, targeted to individuals with hiring authority, and featuring a diverse range of demographic attributes, we successfully acquired a representative sample reflective of the broader population comprising employers tasked with hiring responsibilities. We performed exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to assess the convergent and discriminant validity of each individual model. Since multilevel models are flexible, robust, and helpful in decoding complex situations, from each scale we developed a multilevel hierarchical model. Finally, a unified multilevel model was tested through structural equation modeling (SEM) to evaluate parallel-forms reliability between the proposed constructs. CFA and SEM showed good fit for the observed data. A high coefficient of equivalence between the scales was obtained, demonstrating adequate parallel-forms reliability.