The Symbolic Intersecting Ableism and Racism Scale: A New Way to Examine Explicit Attitudes

Posted on April 30, 2025

By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research

Disabled people of color do not necessarily experience ableism the same way as white disabled people. Just like disabled people of color do not necessarily experience racism the same way as nondisabled people of color. Intersectionality is a concept used to help us better understand these differences – the ways oppression and discrimination intersect and interact.

Yet, historically when scientists have examined discrimination, most of the research has either focused on ableism or racism, not both. That includes the Symbolic Ableism Scale (SAS), a measure I created to examine people’s explicit (conscious) disability attitudes. Since the SAS doesn’t take an intersectional approach, it likely doesn’t capture all aspects of discrimination. That’s why in this study I adapted the SAS to focus both on ableism and racism, creating a new measure called the Symbolic Intersecting Ableism and Racism Scale (SIARS). I piloted the SIARS with 512 people and then validated the tool.

In addition to having sufficient psychometrics for reliability and validation, the findings also indicated the SIARS is comprised of three factors: (1.) denial of continuing discrimination; (2.) individualism; and (3.) empathy. People had the highest level of explicit bias for the continuing discrimination factor, moderate levels of bias for individualism, and low levels of bias for empathy.

SIARS Factors

There were several differences in the SIARS compared to the SAS. For example, in the SAS, which only focuses on disability and not both disability and race, people recognized discrimination instead of denied it. Therefore, when the focus is more clearly on disabled people of color, people are more likely to ignore the discrimination disabled people of color face. In addition, this factor played a more prominent role in the SIARS than the SAS; while in the SAS, individualism played a larger role. Individualism, which is a core component of the medical model, is when disability is seen as an individual problem that must be fixed. Accordingly, it’s believed that people should just try harder and they’ll be able to achieve anything.

“The concept of intersectionality recognizes and reminds us that single-axis measures of oppression are not sufficient, especially for examining the impact on people with multiple marginalized identities (1-3). Yet, there has been less attention to disability when it comes to intersectionality (6, 7). As such, in this study, we sought to develop a new measure that can be used to examine the intersection between ableism and racism, the SIARS. Our findings suggest the SIARS is comprised of a complex combination of denial of continuing discrimination, individualism, and empathy. The findings also indicated many points of contention with the single-axis SAS measure, which examines disability only, further reinforcing the need to measure and attend to intersectionality… Without attending to intersectionality, we will never truly be able to dismantle oppression and discrimination, including the ableism disabled people face” (Friedman, 2025).

This article is a summary of the following journal manuscript: Friedman, C. The Symbolic Intersecting Ableism and Racism Scale (SIARS). Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences, 6, 1576357. https://doi.org/10.3389/fresc.2025.1576357

This study was funded by a grant from the WITH Foundation.