Attitude change and a prison health care experience

Nursing in a prison setting has recently emerged as a field of concern. One of the issues in staff working with prisoners is attitudes and attitude change. Since the most favorable site for attitude formation and/or change is a student's educational experience, the present study was undertaken to explore if nursing students who have a clinical experience with prisoners will demonstrate a change toward more favorable attitudes toward prisoners. The research design was a pre-test, post-test control group design. The instrument was a Likert scale, adapted from previously developed scales dealing with attitudes toward prisoners, the mentally ill, and drug addicts. An important control was contained in the instrument, in that not only were there statements dealing with prisoners, but also dealing with the mentally ill and addicts, with whom none of the students would have student clinical experience. The results revealed that there was no significant difference in attitudes toward prisoners, drug addicts, and the mentally ill on the pre-test for either experimental or control group. However, on the post-test, there was a significantly lower (more positive) score on the scale for prisoners for the experimental group, who had a prison clinical experience. This finding suggests that attitudes can be favorably altered by a relevant student clinical experience.