ATTITUDES OF MEDICAL STUDENTS TOWARDS PEOPLE SUFFERING FROM MENTAL ILLNESS - COMPARISON OF QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE EXPERIMENTAL METHODS

• Authors: Zuchova S.
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The same problem - the attitudes of the medical students towards the mentally ill people - has been approached by one quantitative and one qualitative method (semantic differential vs. content analysis), and the results have been compared. Furthermore, the sample was divided into two groups. Group 1 consisted of the students who at the time of the research had not yet taken the psychiatry examination; group 2 consisted of those students who had already passed this examination. The attitudes in the two groups were compared. The sample consisted of 125 students from the Medical Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. The results show that the attitudes of the medical students towards the people suffering from a mental disease significantly differ from the attitudes in the general population as known from the literature. The attitudes change in the course of the studies, too. When comparing the subjects' evaluations on the numeric scales of the semantic differential and in the open questions, we see that both methods lead to similar results. It can be concluded that the attitudes described by the qualitative method agree with the attitudes described by the quantitative method, and furthermore, that the qualitative method has enabled the research to depict also such evaluations that would have remained hidden when using only semantic differential.

Keywords

EN

ATTITUDES TOWARDS MENTALLY ILL; MEDICAL STUDENTS; MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE; QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGY

Discipline

• PSYCHOLOGY: PSYCHOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Experimental Psychology, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Studia Psychologica
• Year: 2006
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 349-359
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Zuchova S.

• S. Zuchova, Psychiatricke oddelenie, Fakultna nemocnica, Trencin, Legionarska 28, 911 71 Trencin, Slovak Republic

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

07SKAAAA01934142