disabilities; 3) the Wang (1998) version of the CDP (Yuker & Hurley, 1987), a measure

of contact with persons with disabilities; and 4) a demographic questionnaire.

The Modified Hate Crime Survey

 The Hate Crime Survey was constructed by Alexandra Miller (2001) to study

whether criminal justice students' agreement with labeling crime scenarios as hate crimes

would differ from students in other disciplines. The original survey consists of 20 actual

hate crime scenarios reported to the FBI and offenses tracked by the Southern Poverty

Law Center included in its annual report, Klanwatch (Miller, 2001). The 20 items

included five scenarios from each of four protected categories: race, religion, sexual

orientation, and gender. Participants rate on a 7-point scale their level of agreement for

whether each crime scenario constitutes a hate crime. This survey was of particular

interest for this research study for the following reasons: (1) the survey included gender

as a protected category which, as stated in Chapter 2, has similarities to disability; (2) it is

the only survey designed to look for differences across protected categories; and (3) the

author of the survey agreed to allow modification of the survey to include people with

disabilities.

Miller's (2001) Hate Crime Survey was modified to: (1) include 5 crime scenarios that

involve a bias crime committed against a person with a disability, (2) include five crime

scenarios (one scenario for each protected category) that did not have any bias crime

indicators, and (3) modify the remaining scenarios so they were balanced with regard to

the type of indicator and severity of crime (SEE Appendix A). The five bias crime

scenarios introduced in the modified version include a sensory disability, a mental

disability, a developmental disability, an infectious disease, and a neuromuscular

disability. Although the disabilities represented are not inclusive of all types of