Multicultural attitudes of pre-professional health education students.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study investigated relationships among health educations students' attitudes towards racism, sexism, and homophobia and their (a) comfort in working with specific populations; (b) comfort in working with specific health issues; and (c) interest in working with specific health issues.
The participants consisted of 274 students from nine universities across the United States. Each student received a flier and e-mail from a study site contact inviting participation. Upon accessing the URL link, the student was directed to a secure website that contained the survey components: demographic, comfort, and interest questions; and two established measurement tools, the Quick Discrimination Index, and the Index of Attitudes towards Homosexuals (IAH).
The sample primarily consisted of Caucasian (84%), undergraduate (64.3%) women (88.6%). Correlations were used to test all null hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance. Educational level was significantly related to sexism (p = .000), general racial attitudes (p = .000), and homophobia (p = .001). Participant ethnicity was significantly associated with affective racial attitudes (p = .000). Strong correlations were found between homophobia scores and comfort in working with bisexual women (r = -.574, p = .000), lesbians (r = -.525, p = .000), bisexual men (r = -.471, p = .000), and gay men (r = .407, p = .000); comfort with gay and lesbian health issues (r = -.469, p = .000); and interest in gay and lesbian health issues (r = -.561, p = .000). The inverse relationships are indicative of lower scores on the IAH being more desirable. Sexism scores were strongly correlated with interest in gay and lesbian health issues (r = .406, p = .000). Interest in minority health issues was strongly correlated with general racial attitudes (r = .499, p = .000) and affective racial attitudes (r = .413, p = .000).
This primarily white female sample appeared to be most interested in women's health, and least interested in gay and lesbian health. They appeared to be most comfortable with women, and least comfortable with developmentally and physically disabled individuals; and most comfortable with women's health, and least comfortable with gay and lesbian health issues. Thus, the future work force may not be prepared to work with those communities that need their services the most. This need in educating the future workforce is a further challenge to eliminate health disparities.