Resisting Public Stigma Among College Students with Disabilities in South Korea: The Mediating Roles of Disability Advocacy and Self-Stigma in the Relationship between Public Stigma and Empowerment

Background and Purpose: People with disabilities often face public stigma that can negatively affect their empowerment. Strengthening empowerment is crucial for college students with disabilities in developing identity and enhancing their well-being. To resist public stigma, they often engage in disability advocacy activities. According to the theoretical framework of resisting stigma and personal responses to stigma model, self-stigma can exacerbate the effect of public stigma on empowerment, whereas disability advocacy can buffer the effect of public stigma on empowerment among college students with disabilities. However, few studies have simultaneously examined the mediating effects of disability advocacy and self-stigma on the pathways between public stigma and empowerment. This study proposed and tested a parallel mediation model with disability advocacy and self-stigma mediating the relationship between public stigma and empowerment.

Methods: This cross-sectional study involved 103 college students with physical disabilities in South Korea. Inclusion criteria were (a) currently attending college and (b) registered as having disabilities in the Korea National Disability System. Participants were recruited from student organizations and the Office of Disability Services for students with disabilities. Students’ public stigma, self-stigma, disability advocacy, and empowerment were assessed using a structured questionnaire. Age, gender, type and degree of disability, economic level, and whether their disability was congenital were included as controls. The PROCESS macros in SPSS Statistics 24 were used to assess the hypothesized parallel mediation model, and 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals (CIs) were generated by the bias-corrected bootstrapping method using 5,000 resamples to examine the significance of the mediation effect of advocacy activities and self-stigma in the relationship between public stigma and empowerment.

Results: All participants were college students with a mean age of 24.1 (SD = 5.53). More than half were men (51.5%), more than a third had an orthopedic impairment (37.3%), and many had an acquired impairment (69.9%). The model explained 29.24% (p < .001) of the variance in empowerment. Results show that the direct effect of public stigma on empowerment was not statistically significant (β = .08, CI [-.03, .20]). Disability advocacy (β = .08, p < .05) and self-stigma (β = -.21, p < .001) were significantly associated with empowerment. Self-stigma fully mediated the effect of public stigma on empowerment (indirect effect = -.10, SE = .04; 95% bias-corrected CI = [-.19, -.05]), but disability advocacy did not significantly mediate the relationship (indirect effect = -.01, SE = .02; 95% bias-corrected CI = [-.05, .02]). In other words, public stigma could increase self-stigma, leading to lower sense of empowerment.

Conclusion and Implications: The study highlights the full mediating role of self-stigma on the linkage of public stigma and empowerment among college students with disabilities. Professionals should provide services aimed at mitigating self-stigma internalized from public stigma and maximizing the unique contributions of involvement with disability advocacy activities to strengthen the empowerment of college students with disabilities. Researchers should focus on mechanisms that explain how disability advocacy influences the effects of public stigma on empowerment, which would widen our understanding of the stigma response process.