Stigma toward people with mental illness can have deleterious effects; employers avoid hiring them, landlords avoid renting to them, and... Show moreStigma toward people with mental illness can have deleterious effects; employers avoid hiring them, landlords avoid renting to them, and negative attitudes are often a barrier to receiving quality health care. Literature on political ideology indicates that people tend to have fairly stable attitudes over time that are consistent with their political orientation. It is also the case that political ideology is an underlying factor of attitudes toward personal responsibility and hierarchical societal structure. Political ideology, as an underlying framework for attributing controllability through which many individuals view the world, is a demographic variable that needs to be further explored to more completely integrate variances into anti-stigma approaches. Pre-intervention data from a larger study assessing the effects of newspaper articles on attitudes about mental illness were utilized to examine the influence of political orientation on stigmatizing and affirming attitudes toward people with mental illness. Pearson product moment correlations between demographics, political orientation variables, stigmatizing attitudes, and affirming attitudes were conducted. Regression analyses were conducted to determine if political orientation or the interaction between political orientation and demographics are significantly related to stigmatizing attitudes. Results showed that political affiliation emerged as significant associated with pity, danger, blame, and anger when moderated by other demographics suggesting that endorsement of affiliation with a particular political party alone is not sufficient to emerge as related to stigmatizing attitudes, but rather varies at levels of other demographic variables. M.S. in Psychology, May 2013 Show less
