Date of Conferral

1-1-2011

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Psychology

Advisor

Hannah Lerman

Abstract

Psychosocial rehabilitation (PSR) is a community-based service that addresses the challenges faced by people diagnosed as having psychiatric disabilities. While working with co workers and clients, PSR workers may harbor perceptions that could lower the effectiveness of their work and hinder recovery by their clients. Although cognitive-behavioral theory has suggested an association, research has not yet connected PSR worker attitudes about psychiatric situations to their feelings and behavior. In this nonexperimental factorial design, 196 PSR workers were surveyed about the frustrations presented by stressful interpersonal job situations using the Psychiatric Situations Scale to identify whether occupation (case workers, residential workers, day program workers, and vocational workers), years of experience (low: less than 5 years, medium: between 5 and 10 years, high: more than 10 years), and gender were associated with significant attitude differences. The most interesting research question was whether there were differences in the levels of frustration experienced by persons in different PSR occupations. The data were analyzed using ANOVA. No significant main effects or simple effects were revealed. This likely occurred because PSR socializes workers into their mission and values leaving similar attitudes across groups, and also because the sample was homogeneous. Social change implications include the addition of new data to the research, thus enabling researchers to more efficiently identify significant differences among PSR workers. Such results should improve PSR through training targeted toward groups at-risk for the development of burnout and client secondary gain. PSR might be improved by future research that uses an increased sample size to obtain a heterogenous sample, uses other variables, or uses the qualitative method to categorize data.

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