Attitudes and models about mental illness held by social workers in mental health settings
Description
This research was an exploratory study into the attitudes and models about mental illness held by social workers employed in fourteen mental health settings located throughout the greater metropolitan areas of New Orleans, Louisiana The purposes of this study were: (1) to identify and describe the attitudes and models about mental illness held by social workers, (2) to study the relationship between attitudes and selected demographic variables; and (3) to investigate the relationship between attitudes toward mental illness and models held by social workers about mental illness Data were collected from 95 social workers who worked directly with mental patients and were employed in public, private and university related mental health settings. The study was conducted over a consecutive twelve week period beginning March and ending June 1979 Three instruments were used in the study to collect the data: (1) a fifty-one item questionnaire, Opinions about Mental Illness (OMI), developed by Cohen and Struening (1963) to measure attitudes toward mental illness; (2) a twenty-four item questionnaire developed by the investigator and derived from the work of Siegler and Osmond (1974) to study models of mental illness; and (3) a six item questionnaire designed to measure selected demographic information of the subjects. Attitudes were studied in terms of the positive attitudinal factors of Benevolence, Mental Hygiene Ideology, and Interpersonal Etiology and the negative attitudinal factors of Authoritarianism and Social Restrictiveness. Models of mental illness were studied in terms of the continuous (Psychoanalytic, Social, Conspiratorial, Psychedelic, and Family Interaction) models and the discontinuous (Medical, Moral, and Impaired) models Mean scores and analysis of variance were used in describing and analyzing the data. In addition, Kendall's tau correlation coefficients were computed for relevant pairs of variables In this exploratory study several major findings were cited. In regards to attitudes, the social workers agreed more with the positive attitudes than the negative attitudes toward mental illness. In studying the relationship between attitudes and demographic variables, the findings varied. While age and education were not significantly related to any of the five attitudes, the demographic variable of years of service in an agency was found to be strongly correlated to the negative attitudinal factor of Social Restrictiveness. In terms of models, the social workers agreed slightly more with the continuous models than the discontinuous models The findings also indicated that the study of attitudes and models about mental illness held by social workers is a complicated issue that involves many unknown factors and deserves more extensive research. Recommendations for additional research projects were made