each of the two children age groups (6–8 years and 9–11 years) with the new two consistency scales and the custom complex variables.
As shown in Table 1, children 6–8 years’ preference (open-ended) for the individual model negatively correlated with parental encouragement of religious (p < 0.05) and social activities (p < 0.05). Children 6–8 years’ agreement (closed-ended) for the individual model positively correlated with their appreciation of social activities and interests (p < 0.05). Children 6–8 years’ agreement for the social model correlated positively with their knowledge level about disability (p < 0.01) and with their interests and preference for activities of general type (p < 0.05). The more the parents agreed the individual model, the more the children of 6–8 years were interested in religious activities (p < 0.01) and the less in activities related to body and health (p < 0.05).
As shown in Table 2, children 9–11 years’ preference for the social model inversely correlated with their parent’s agreement (closed-ended) for the individual model (p < 0.05), while parental’ preference (open-ended) for the individual model positively correlated with children 9–11 years’ agreement for the individual model (p < 0.05). The agreement (closed-ended) for the individual model in children 9–11 years also correlated positively with their stereotype level about disability (p < 0.05) and their interest in social activities (p < 0.05) and negatively with general interests and activities (p < 0.01). Agreement (closed-ended) for the social model positively correlated with a greater knowledge of disability (p < 0.05) and with interests and activities of a religious nature (p < 0.05).
Disability Explanation—Open-Ended Questionnaire
Considering the open-ended questionnaire, the individual model is most commonly used by all age groups but decreases with age while preferences for the social model increase with age. These results are in line with a previous study where the individual model was preferred to the social model via the Implicit Association Test . In contrast to the individual model, the use of the social model significantly increases from the youngest to the older. In other words, the younger the respondent is, the greater the preference for the individual model. This prompts us to believe that the strong polarization between individual and social model [5, 15–17] is a cultural construct rather than a cognitive constraint: One births “individual” and dies “social.” The ontogenetic evolution of the social model seems to mirror the historical development of the disability models; whereas the individual model crosses throughout the human history with its several faces (religious, ethic, aesthetic, medical, biological) [20–22, 46], the social model developed recently in Britain in opposition to the individual one [18, 25]. By adopting a social perspective on disability (social model) as they age, people provide a more complex explanation of disability, although not at the complexity level of the biopsychosocial model , which is not preferred by any age group.
Disability Explanation—Closed-Ended Questionnaire
Considering the closed-ended questionnaire, preference for the social model increases with age whereas preference for the individual model decreases with age (Fig 2). The most striking difference when comparing the open- and closed-ended questionnaires is that the mean agreement for the social (and biopsychosocial) model is significantly higher than for the individual model for all age groups. What happened in the shift from the open- to closed-ended questions, administered to the same respondents in a span of a few minutes from each other? We think that people used two cognitive processes elicited by different contexts hinged on two distinct testing procedures. In the open-ended questions, the task was to provide a personal opinion on why a man in a wheelchair (or a blind woman, or an autistic child, or an able-bodied woman) has difficulties in life. In this case, respondents recall from memory and process a veridical e