General ability and opinions about mental illness among psychiatric aides.

Abstract

Preemployment general ability tests have been found to be significant predictors of post-training mental health knowledg: of psychiatric aides (2). No attempt has been made to determine if performance on general ability tests is related to post-training mental health attitudes. Since research with the Opinions About Mental Illness Scale (1) has indicated more favorable attitudes to be associated with higher mental health knowledge scores (4), a significant correlation between general ability and attitudes would be expected. We studied the relationship between scores on three general ability tests and attitudes 01 71 newly employed psychiatric aides in a state mental hospital. The aides (42 males, 29 fema!es) had a mean age of 26.5 yr. (range 18-58) and a mean education of 11.8 y c. (range 9-15 ). Form 1A of the Otis Employment Test (3). a state Civil Service Test for attendants, and the Personnel Tests for Industry-Verbal Test (5) were administered to the aides prior to employment and the attitude scale was given after completion of a 5-wk. basic training program. On the Authoritarianism factor of the attirude scale the Otis test correlated -.24 (p < .05), the Civil Service Test correlated -.31 (p < .01), and the Personnel Test for Industry-Verbal Test correlated -.28 (p < .05). Two of the ability rests correlated significantly with the Social Restrictiveness factor, i.e., the Otis test correlated -.23 (P < .05) and the Civil Service Test correlated -.25 (p < .05). Significant correlations were found also between the Otis test and the Mental Hygiene Ideology factor (r = .25, p < .05) and between the Verbal Test and Interpersonal Etiology factor (r = .32, p < .01). None of the ability tests were correlated with the Benevolence attitude factor. No significant relationship was found between the attitude factors and age, education, or sex. Although the results indicated that higher general ability scores were associated with more favorable attitudes on several attitude test factors, the correlations were lower than those found between general ability tests and post-training mental health knowledge (2). In the present sample general ability scores accounted for a relatively small amount of the variance in the attitude scores.