Dataset _ Cultural influences on perception of disability and disabled people: A comparison of opinions from students in the United Kingdom (UK) and Pakistan (PAK) about a generic wheelchair, using a semantic differential scale.

The projected growth Internationally in Assistive Technology (AT) online marketing suggests designers need to be aware of the influence that a diverse cultural background may have on the consumers perception of an AT product’s attributes. During user-product visual interaction in online marketing, the visual semantics offers a language for the product to communicate a designer-intended message. An on-going programme of study by the authors aims to evaluate the visual online interaction with an AT product [manual wheelchair] by groups from the culturally distinct countries of Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

A paper-based questionnaire survey was carried out with 281 first-year undergraduate students from the UK and Pakistan to evaluate their responses towards a visualization of traditional wheelchair. A semantics differential (SD) scale method was used involving a seven-point bipolar SD scale incorporating sixteen pairs of adjectives defining functional, meaning, and usability attributes of the product. The mean (M) and standard deviation (sd) values were obtained for each pair of adjectives and compared between both groups by employing appropriate parametric and non-parametric tests. The results show that for this group having a diverse cultural background did not appear to have overtly influenced the meanings ascribed to the manual wheelchair, which was unexpected. Some minor but critical differences were found for some pair of adjectives (bulky-compact, heavy-light), having p-value less than 0.05 (p<0.05) that related to previous experience of wheelchairs and or their use.

These data sets provide the details of survey and questionnaire data gathered from the participants of both cultural groups. The core data set has been divided into two sub-sets comprising the raw data files and the outcomes of study. From the raw data archives the nature of participant’s responses could be determined and separate representation of the research findings were presented to provide the precise outcomes of survey.

The compiled version of this collection have been published in the journal paper having following DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17483107.2019.1568595