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Personnel Staff Attitudes Toward The Employment Of Persons With Physical Disability, Mental Retardation, Or Mental Illness, Karol Ruth Oldenburg

Student Work

This thesis describes a measurement of personnel staff attitudes and perceptions toward the employability of disabled job applicants. More specifically, direct comparisons among three types of disability categories were made using Osgood's Semantic Scaling Method.

Sixty employment professionals of the Lincoln Human Resources Management Association rated a job applicant with physical disability, with mental retardation, and one with mental illness on the basis of 15 paired opposite adjectives. These adjectives described a variety of attributes which could be grouped into evaluative, potency, and activity dimensions of semantic space.

Respondents completed a four-page questionnaire which rated physically disabled, mentally retarded, and …

An Experimental Study Of The Impact Of Clinical Psychodiagnosis, Diagnostic Concept And Dogmatism On The Perception Of Psychopathology., Jane Ellen Stilwell Smith

Student Work

The subject of psychiatric diagnosis and the ramifications of a person being labeled as "mentally ill" has attracted increased attention in the past decade. Personal testimony from psychiatric patients about the difficulty in securing employment, returning to familiar abodes, and re-entering a scholastic environment because of rejection by "normal" society, has been documented in confidential case files, witnessed by friends and relatives, and published for lay consumption (Rubin, 1960; Salinger, 1951; and Green, 1964). Other literature has been devoted to the apparently negative psychological aspects of being an in-patient in a mental institution (Caudwill, 1958; Goffman, 1961; and Gordon, 1971). …