Aids Related Attitudesamong Government Employees

Abstract

A literature-based questionnaire containing measures of fear and knowledge of AIDS, respondent views of workplace consequences of AIDS, and AIDS as a public policy issue was administered to a random sample of government employees at the county, city, state, and federal levels in non-health services agencies located in one county in northwest Florida. Survey results and findings are presented along with recommendations to organizations for developing an AIDS training program. about the need for AIDS education programs in the contemporary work place. The premise of the majority of arguments for such education programs is that, at some point, nearly every organization will be confronted with the challenges of dealing with an AIDS infected employee and coworkers' reactions to working with that infected employee. The literature citing a need for informationbased employee training programs argues that a great deal of misinformation, as well as an absolute lack of general information, about AIDS continues to be prevalent.In such an environment, it is ar-gued, workers require accurate and up-to-date information about AIDS prior to having to cope with the difficulties associated with an AIDS infected coworker. Minetos (1989) and others believe that knowledge-based education of employees is the key to combating employees' fear of contracting AIDS through casual contact in the work place. It is not clear from the literature, however, that in-service AIDS education programs meet the goals of greater knowledge of AIDS and reduced fear among employees. In order to research this question we conducted a survey of government employees to: (1) ascertain current knowledge and attitudes about AIDS; (2) deat UNIVERSITE DE MONTREAL on July 5, 2015 rop.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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“…Drawing from items used by various researchers in previous studies (e.g., Keeton, 1993; Lim & Loo, 2000; Wan & Wong, 1998), I developed 25 items to tap the construct of AIDS knowledge. Consistent with previous studies, I examined level of perceived AIDS knowledge instead of actual knowledge as past research suggests that people tended to act according to their perceptions rather than actual knowledge (Keeton, 1993). Items were scored on a 5-point scale, ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5), and were coded such that higher scores reflected higher levels of AIDS knowledge.…”

“…Fear experienced within the organizational context is a negative and counterproductive emotion, as it disrupts the interactions that typically occur at the workplace and creates a strained and wary atmosphere. Fear of AIDS has been associated with numerous predictor variables, including but not limited to knowledge of HIV transmission (Keeton, 1993; Lim & Loo, 2000; Pryor et al, 1991), level of homophobia (Herek & Capitanio, 1999), and attribution of responsibility (Mannetti & Pierro, 1991). In the present study, I selected a limited number of predictors, which on the basis of theory and research on AIDS and individual differences appear to have a reasonable possibility of accounting for a significant proportion of the variability in the prediction of AIDS fear.…”