The "R-Word"

The purpose of our study was to determine whether there is a correlation between how often students and teachers use the words “retard” or “retarded” and whether they personally know someone with a disability and whether they use the r-word as a medical term or not. We predicted that people would use the word less if they knew someone with a disability, and people would use the word less if they only used it as a medical term. As we began our study, we first searched for background information regarding our project. We discovered many studies based on the r-word, but most focused on the perception of the word, while we wanted our study to focus on the frequency the word r-word is used.

Using the information we gathered, we developed a survey with three questions. The first asked about the frequency the responder used the word. There were five categories of frequency used in our study: everyday, a few times a week, once every few months, never, and not sure. Each responder was asked to place their use of the word into a category. We also asked whether or not they used the word as a medical term and whether or not they personally knew someone with a disability. We then sent a survey to each person in the sample we gathered. Our sample consisted of 100 North Olmsted High School students and 11 North Olmsted High School teachers. This sample was randomly taken from our population of interest, all North Olmsted High School students and teachers. We received surveys back from 74 students and 9 teachers.

The results we found proved to be very interesting. Of the surveys returned, 58.1% of the students used the word everyday or a few times a week, 77.8% of the teachers never use the word, 88.1% of students don’t use the word as a medical term, 55.6% of teachers don’t use the word as a medical term, 77.7% of students have a personal relationship with someone with a disability, and 100% of teachers have a personal relationship with someone with a disability. After reviewing these results, we performed chi-square tests to discover any association among the variables. However, we had to group some of the frequency categories together in order to meet the assumptions that every expected cell count is greater than 5. In our chi-square test of association between students’ frequency of use and whether or not they use it as a medical term we had a p-value of 0.059. In our chi-square test of association between students’ frequency of use and whether or not they personally knew someone with a disability we had a p-value of 0.423. In our chi-square test of association between the responders’ frequency of use and whether they were a teacher or a student, we were unable to reach a valid conclusion because our assumptions were not met as all expected cell counts were not greater than 5.

We were able to conclude that there is an association between students’ frequency of use and whether or not they use it as a medical term and that there is no apparent association between students’ frequency of use and whether or not they personally knew someone with a disability. We were unable to make any conclusions regarding the data we obtained from teachers because some of the expected cell counts were less than 5.