A scale for the measurement of attitudes to mental illness

An instrument consisting of 40 semantic differential scales was administered to 125 female student nurses who were instructed to rate the concepts "normal person," "typical mental case," and "mad man." The mean scores on the three ratings were significantly different (p less than .001). Coefficient alpha ranged from .90 to .93, and average item-correlation (total minus item) from .41 to .47. These results justify further use of the instrument.