TPC-Journal-V1-Issue1

16 The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 1 proximity to me (Taylor & Dear, 1981). Evidence for internal consistency of the CAMI was clear for three of the four scales with the current sample: Community Mental Health Ideology (α= .86), Social Restrictiveness (α= .80), and Benevolence (α= .81). Only the Authoritarianism subscale (α= .62) was problematic in this research. Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. The Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS; Crowne & Marlowe, 1960) was included in order to assess the extent to which participants were answering in a socially desirable manner to further validate the attitudes captured by the CAMI and the Social Distance Scale. The MCSDS is the most commonly used social desirability assessment (Leite & Beretvas, 2005) and has demonstrated strong reliability. The original authors obtained a Kuder-Richardson reliability coefficient estimate of .88 (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960). A Cronbach’s alpha of .85 with the current sample provides evidence of reliability with this sample. Procedure Potential participants were invited to respond to the survey via electronic email. Email addresses of potential mental health professional participants were obtained from comprehensive statewide lists of the various subgroups of interest. To collect the sample of students, graduate students were contacted via various departmental listservs. Non-mental health professionals were reached through an alumni listserv obtained from a non-mental health training program. Participants were told that the following survey was designed to investigate attitudes towards adults with mental illness. Included in the email was a link to the survey, which was housed at a commercial online site for electronic survey research. Results As a preliminary analysis, scores on the Social Distance Scale and the CAMI were correlated with scores on the MCSDS to investigate whether participants were answering in a socially desirable manner. It has been suggested by authors (Leite & Beretvas, 2005) that a low correlation between the Marlowe-Crowne Desirability scale and the scale of interest indicates honest responses. No scores of interest correlated significantly at a .05 level with scores on the MCSDS. This provides evidence that social desirability did not have a substantive role in participant responses and that participants answered questions on the Social Distance Scale and the CAMI with a reasonable level of honesty. To answer RQ1 and RQ3, a 2 X 2 X 2 ANOVA (professional level [trainee vs. professional] X status [mental health vs. non-mental health] X gender [female vs. male] X Social Distance) was used to investigate the desired social distance toward people with a mental illness. This analysis assessed for main effects based on professional level (trainee vs. professional), main effects based on status (mental health vs. non-mental health), main effects based on gender (female vs. male), and possible interaction effects between professional level, status, and gender. There was a significant main effect found for status F (1, 184) = 16.44, p < .05, η² = .08. Mental health trainees and professionals had higher mean scores on the Social Distance Scale ( M = 3.4, SD = .38) than non-mental health trainees and professionals ( M = 3.0, SD = .54). Results indicated a main effect for gender F (1, 184) = 6.63, p < .05, η²=.04. Women desired less social distance than men ( M = 3.38, SD = .39 vs. M = 3.13, SD = .54) and an interaction effect for gender X mental health status F (1, 184) = 12.17, p < .05, η²=.07. Marginal means revealed that the non-mental health male sub-group was most important in separating the groups. There were no other significant main or interactive effects. A 2 X 3 ANOVA (professional level [trainee or professional] X professional orientation [counseling, social work, psychology] X Social Distance) was used to investigate the differences in desired social distance. Results indicated that there was a main effect for professional orientation F (2, 184) = 17.67, p < .05, η² =.16. Univariate follow-up analyses indicated that participants with the professional orientation of counselor and psychologist desired significantly less social distance ( M = 3.40, SD = .34; M = 3.40, SD = .4, respectively), than those who identified as social worker and non-mental health professional ( M = 2.89, SD = .62; M = 3.06, SD = .49). Finally, although attitudes towards mental illness and social distance have been discussed in the literature (Gureje et al., 2005; Taylor & Dear, 1981), the relationship between attitudes towards mental illness and social distance towards mental illness had not been explored using the CAMI and the Social Distance Scale. Therefore, bivariate correlations were