Conjoint analysis in rehabilitation counseling research

The study of societal attitudes toward people with disabilities has long been an important research area in rehabilitation counseling. One of the current research foci is to study factors influencing attitudes toward disability in multiple social contexts using indirect measurement methods. In recent years, conjoint analysis (also known as "trade-off analysis"), a market research tool for analyzing how people make complex judgments, has been used successfully to study societal attitudes toward disability. It appears that conjoint measurement may have potential for use as an indirect measure of attitudes toward disability, especially when the goal of the research is to solve real-life disability-related policy problems. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of (a) current research issues in attitudes toward disability research, (b) applications of conjoint measurement and analysis in attitudes toward disability research, and (c) the conjoint analysis methodology and statistical technique.