Disabilities Act protects them and were not confident of their ability to disclose their disability to an employer. According to the authors, employers are themselves lacking in knowledge about the Act. This ignorance on both parts enables employers to retain stereotypic and incorrect views of the disabled and encourages them to try to get around the law.
Several other factors have been found to be associated with negative employer attitudes toward compliance with ADA. These include the degree to which the employer has had experience and contact with disabled people (Levy, Jessop, Rimmerman & Levy, 1992); belief that disabled people have skill deficits (Mueller & Wilgosh, 1991) or that they have bad character or bad attitudes (Wilgosh & Mueller, 1989); failure of counseling programs to properly prepare employers for working with the disabled, especially by including employers in training programs (Vargo & Dennis, 1989); perceived increases in company insurance premiums (Giliberti, 1994); perceived increases in costs due to accommodation concerns (Gilbride, Stensrud & Connolly, 1992); difficulties fitting disabled employee to the proper job (Gilbride, Stensrud & Connolly, 1992); and increased costs in supplying disability benefits.
Clearly, the foregoing studies indicate that one of the most important components of making sure that ADA legislation is enforced is dealing with those factors that employers' perceive as making compliance difficult; this because it is only by understanding these perceptions that maximal actions can be taken by counselors and relevant others to remediate those that are negative. The purpose of the study proposed here is to survey's several companies and firms in an effort to determine which factors employers believe make it most difficult for them to comply with the ADA.
Specifically, employers will be given a list of several factors existing research has associated with employers' feeling n...