Clinician Attitudes toward Borderline Personality Disorder Essay

Clinician Attitudes toward Borderline Personality Disorder - Essay Example This study aims to prove that often, even the mental health clinicians dealing with BPD have less than sympathetic views on the disorder. The study is correlational, because there are no experimental techniques used. Correlational studies look to show the relationship between variables and results. This study looks to see correlation between sub-types of clinician, years worked in mental health care and number of patients with BPD cared for in the past year and the attitudes toward patients with BPD. It is also a cross-sectional study, in that it provides information on attitudes at a certain point in time. The questionnaire was distributed to all relevant clinicians at all nine centers simultaneously, and thus all responses were formed at a similar point in time. The study provides no information on how the variables may affect the participants over time (and is thus not a longitudinal study). The subjects were 706 mental health clinicians (clinicians in this case being an umbrella term for nurses, physicians, social workers, psychologists etc.) from 9 different academic centers. Every clinician within these centers was provided with a questionnaire, and the 706 respondents were those that replied – they were a self-selecting sample. The issue with this is that there may be a subtype of person who is more likely to respond to this type of survey – they may have more time available than others and thus may be more understanding of patients with BPD.... However, the aforementioned subtype of clinician likely to respond and the very nature of questionnaires mean that any responses lack true ecological validity. The primary variables, as defined by the study, were the specific subgroup of clinician (psychiatrist, psychiatry resident, social worker, staff nurse, nurse practitioner/physician assistant, psychologist, and â€Å"other†), the number of years having worked with mental health patients, and the number of patients with BPD that the individual has worked with over the past year. The secondary variables or covariates were the gender of the individual and the center at which they worked. In my opinion, the primary variables were reasonable for this study. The specific subgroup opinion was part of the hypothesis (the coordinators of the study made predictions such as ‘social workers will have more caring attitudes’) and thus was a key variable. The number of patients with BPD that the individual has worked with is also key. The number-based variables were assessed in groups, such as 0-5, 6-10 etc., and again this is a reasonable measurement, although there are some issues where a clinician has worked in the area for 5 years – the individual may have attitudes more similar to the 6-10 group. The subgroup variable was also useful as it had a diverse range of roles available, although the â€Å"other† group may be too ambiguous and provide results that need further probing. The main problem with the study is the fact that the subtype of clinician was highly variable in the number of respondents – 227 psychiatrists responded, compared to only 17 nurse practitioners. This means that any conclusion formed from the responses