Vocational rehabilitation (VR) is a program that provides individualized and supportive services to assist individuals with disabilities in obtaining and maintaining employment compatible with their skills, abilities, and interests. Previous research has suggested that people with disabilities are at risk of experiencing discrimination in multiple stages of the rehabilitation process. The primary purpose of this study was to explore if recommendations for hypothetical rehabilitation services by rehabilitation counseling (RC) student participants were influenced by (a) the hypothetical consumer’s race, (b) causal attribution of disability, (c) RC student’s race, and (d) the interaction of the counselor’s race and consumer’s race. A 2 × 2 × 3 factorial design was utilized and the findings revealed that a hypothetical consumer who was perceived as personally responsible for the cause of his or her disability was more likely to receive fewer recommendations for rehabilitation services than a consumer with an external cause. Other results from this study revealed that recommendations for rehabilitation services were not influenced by the hypothetical consumer’s race, RC student’s race, the interaction of the RC student’s race and consumer’s race, or the interaction of the RC student’s race and cause of disability. Discussion and implications are provided.
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