TITLE:
Professional Attitudes towards Mental Illness: Testing the Contact Hypothesis among Nurses of Ethnic Anglo and Chinese Australian Backgrounds
AUTHORS:
Tan Kan Ku, Michael Ha, Uthit Siriwan
KEYWORDS:
Mental Illness, Ethnicity, Psychiatric, Cross-Culture, Attitude
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.3 No.7,
July
14,
2015
ABSTRACT:
Background: Professional attitudes towards
mental illness may be related to contact level and ethnicity has not been
thoroughly examined in health care practices although this has been stated to
be the case. The literature indicated contact through a course of study or
clinical placement usually improved attitudes of health workers towards mental
illness. Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop a measure (labelled as
Contact with Psychiatric Patient (CPP) Scale to compare attitudes towards
mental illness between General and Psychiatric nurses of Anglo and Chinese
Australian backgrounds. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was presented to 76 general
and 132 psychiatric nurses. Twenty one questions of the nurse-patient contact
level were asked. Principal component analyses (with oblique rotation) were
used to identify underlying dimensionality in the correlations of items. Subscale
score variations were analysed across nurse type and ethnicity to examine the
discriminant validity of the subscales. Results: Principal component analysis revealed
four dimensions accounting for 67.3 percent of the variation within items. Four
“conceptual” factors were derived. These were labelled Contact-Through-Work
Situation, Patient Helps Nurse, Relative to Mental Illness and External
Socialisation with Patient. Developed as subscales, reliability analysis
indicated moderate to high internal consistency with respective alpha coefficients
of 0.94, 0.73, 0.55 and 0.81. There was significant variation in scale scores
according to nurse type (psychiatric versus general) and ethnicity (Anglo
versus Chinese). Psychiatric nurses endorsed a higher level of contact level
than general nurses. Conclusion: Psychometric evaluation of the CPP suggests that
it is a reliable instrument for measuring four key dimensions of the nurse-patient
contact relationship and it enables the study of this relationship
cross-culturally in large samples.