Attitude Change Towards Mental Illness during Nursing Education - a Cross -Cultural Study of Student Nurses in Korea, Republic of China and Japan

Attitudes towards mental illness is an important issue in mental health education and this study was undertaken with the aim of assessing attitude change occurring during an educational programme in nursing. Three universities cooperated in this study, namely: Seoul National University in Korea, National Taiwan University in the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Tokyo University in Japan. For assessing attitudes towards mental illness, several measures had already been developed, e.g. the Custodial Mental Illness Ideology Scale (CMI) developed by Gilbert and Levinson, ant the Opinion about Mental Illness (OMI) by Cohen and Struening . These two instruments attempted to measure the examiner's underlying ideology of his or her attitudes toward meantal illness,e.g.“Egalitarianism”,“ Custodial attitude”,“Authoritarianism”and so on. Gelfand and Ullman , Hicks and Spaner used these measures to assess attitude change as a function of medical education . Rabkins, reviewing these studies, concluded that the attitudes of the public were generally negative and rejective.#C2793012