Valoraciones de los inscritos en el curso “Todos somos iguales, todos somos diferentes” sobre las acciones de marketing social usadas para poner en circulación el curso

Abstract

Aprendamos is a city-wide course supported by the local government of Guayaquil, Ecuador, aimed at providing tools to parents of children with disabilities to better care for their children and include them in society at large. This is done by education through a television program aided with a text book and a local tutorial center. The course is distributed with a social marketing strategy supported by several modes of communication, with the goal of influencing attitudes, behavior, and values to improve social inclusion of individuals with disability in the city of Guayaquil. The intention of the course was not only to prepare and help parents through the difficulties they were encountering, but also to establish a strong community bond to develop a more inclusive society. The theory of “Communication for development” arises with the idea of diffusing information to areas otherwise forgotten by mainstream media. Aprendamos has used mass communication media to achieve this. It was set out to measure the impact of this program on the community. The main objective was to assess the attitudes and values toward children with disabilities in community members who finished the course and completed a final exam. A survey was applied to a sample of 207 of this people who had finished the course. The results indicated that participants in the course did come away with a clear message: Social inclusion is everyone’s duty. 60% of the participants consider that the neighborhood is responsible to improve inclusion for people with disabilities. 67% of respondents agree with the integration of people with disabilities in regular schools. Interestingly, mothers of children with disabilities are more apprehensive when discussing inclusion of their children. 8% completely agree with the statement “taking care of a child with disability means to keep him home,” while 12% completely agree with “persons with disabilities should be kept in special institutions.” Still, only 25% of mothers agree that everybody in a community should work towards inclusion. In conclusion, Aprendamos has made a definitive positive impact in the community concerning attitudes toward creating a more inclusive society. The recommendation is to continue supporting this and other similar programs, while improving utilization of new technologies of social media to disseminate information and improve education.