Date on Honors Thesis

Winter 12-4-2019

Major

Psychology

Minor

Equine Science

Examining Committee Member

Dr. Michael Bordieri, Advisor

Examining Committee Member

Dr. Jana Hackathorn, Committee Member

Examining Committee Member

Dr. Patrick Cushen, Committee Member

Abstract/Description

Assistance animals are becoming a greater presence on college campuses. The purpose of the following study was to explore university faculty’s confidence in defining different types of assistance animals, their knowledge of legal mandates, and their attitudes regarding assistance animals. A survey was issued to university faculty utilizing an online program and included measures from a previous study done by Schoenfeld-Tacher, Hellyer, Cheung, and Kogan (2017), as well as added questions to more specifically address the research questions and sample. This study was used to compare faculty knowledge and the knowledge of the general population. 91 participant responses were analyzed. Overall, faculty were most confident and most knowledgeable in defining service dogs and were most accepting of service dogs within the classroom environment, as compared to emotional support dogs and therapy dogs. Further, faculty confidence in defining assistance animals was lower than the general public’s, but faculty within our sample were more accurate in their knowledge than the general public.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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