Differences among Health Professionals in Attitudes toward Persons with AIDS

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the attitudes of health education professors toward persons with AIDS, and to compare findings with similar data from previous studies assessing physician and medical student attitudes toward persons with AIDS. Attitudes toward individuals described in a vignette were elicited from 256 randomly selected health education professors. Subjects received one of four vignettes plus a survey to assess prejudice, social interaction, and interpersonal characteristics. Vignettes differed only in the illness being either AIDS or leukemia, and in sexual preference, which was heterosexual or homosexual.

Results indicated that health education professors considered that persons with AIDS were more responsible for their illness, more deserving of what has happened to them, more dangerous to others, and more deserving to be quarantined than persons with leukemia. The data also suggested that although the professors held negative attitudes toward persons with AIDS, they were not as negative as the attitudes held by physicians or medical students.