Alcoholism Education in a Psychiatric lnstitute. I. Medical Students: Relationship of Personal Characteristics, Attitudes toward Alcoholism and Achievement
During their senior year, students of the Wayne State University School of Medicine (Michigan) spend I month, full time, in a psychiatric rotation. Those assigned to the Detroit Psychiatric Institute have an opportunity to learn about alcoholism and the alcoholic patient in addition to the usual subject matter of clinical and academic psychiatry. A total of 26 students participated in a study (1) to evaluate the impact of this training experience upon (a) the amount of information about alcoholism the student will gain, (b) his attitudes toward alcoholism, (c) certain of his personal characteristics, specifically authoritarianism; and (2) to determine the ways in which the student's degree of authoritarianism interacts with his attitude toward alcoholism and affects how much he learns from his clinical experience. The Alabama Commission on Alcoholism Scale (aca), which measures attitudes toward alcoholism in five related areas, a modified F-Scale, designed to measure “authoritarianism,” and a test of specific information and knowledge about alcoholism and alcoholics (ai) were administered on the first and last days. The students showed statistically significant increments in knowledge about alcoholism after the 30-day rotation period (t=5.2, p<.01). The aca and ai scores were correlated (r=.51, p<.01), indicating that the more favorable the attitude toward alcoholism prior to the clinical exposure, the more information students already had about it. But F-Scale scores were negatively correlated with ai (r=-.40, p<.05), indicating that the more “authoritarian” the student, the less prior information he had available to him. Aca and ai difference scores, reflecting change over the 30-day rotation period, were correlated (r= .45, p<.05), indicating a relationship between development of more favorable attitudes and increments in knowledge. F-Scale scores and aca scores were not significantly correlated (r= - .24). It is concluded that while all students learned significantly about alcoholism, the degree to which an individual student's attitude toward alcoholism became more favorable was related to how much he learned. The experience appeared to have no impact on the degree of “authoritarianism” in the student, and what change occurred in this characteristic was in no way related to change in attitude or increment in knowledge. The results suggest that unless a personal characteristic is so extreme as to be pathological or handicapping to the student, the most economical approach to improving the achievement and clinical function of the student is to direct his attention to the specific attitudes he holds toward patients and their illness.