Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1080/13603116.2024.2396117

Publication Title

International Journal of Inclusive Education

Volume

Article in Press

Pages

1-12

Abstract

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004) mandates that parental input be considered when making educational decisions for children with disabilities, including in physical education. However, parents of children with disabilities often report suboptimal communication experiences with physical educators. The purpose of the current study was to examine if the initiation of a parent–physical educator relationship is influenced by whether students have a disability or not. An online message correspondence study methodology was used to detect potential disparities in the responsiveness of a sample of 320 physical educators to electronic message requests for a phone call to discuss physical education service from hypothetical parents of a child with a visual impairment (VI), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Down syndrome (DS), or no disability. Parents of children with ASD had reduced odds of receiving a positive response as compared to parents of children without disabilities (15.8% vs 26.9% RR = .57). Similarly, parents of children with DS had reduced odds of receiving a positive response as compared to parents of children without disabilities (15.2% vs 26.9%, RR = .59). Strategies to promote parent–physical educator relationships are urgently needed, especially for parents of children with ASD and DS.

Rights

© 2024 The Authors.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the accepted manuscript in a repository by the authors or with their consent..

Original Publication Citation

Healy, S., Haegele, J. A., & Holland, S. K. (2024). Can we talk? A correspondence study to examine responsiveness of physical educators to requests for a phone call from parents of children with disabilities. International Journal of Inclusive Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2024.2396117

ORCID

0000-0002-8580-4782 (Haegele)

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