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The relationship between goodness and happiness, between wickedness and punishment is so strong, that given one of these conditions, the other is frequently assumed. Misfortune, sickness, and accident are often taken as signs of badness and guilt. If (a person) is unfortunate, then he has committed a sin. Heider (1958, p. 235) Illness is a universal phenomenon, and every society develops ways of defining and coping with illness. It is a fact of life with which everyone must live, although the effects of disease and reactions to illness may vary widely across individuals and cultures. Individuals and groups vary in their susceptibility to certain diseases, in their beliefs and attitudes toward illness, and in the ways in which they explain and adapt to illness. These variations in the distribution, definition, and reaction to illness have led to the recognition of illness as a psychosocial as well as biological phenomenon, and have increasingly become the objects of social and psychological inquiry.

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Attributions that point to sexual orientation being involuntary tend to be associated with more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals (Herek & Capitanio, 1995). Aside from attributions, those with more contact with sexual minorities are likely to have accepting attitudes about bisexuality (Mayfield & Carruba, 1996). Yet, the quality of the contact matters; research indicates that those with poorer qualitative contact have less positive attitudes toward homosexuals (Hodson, Harry, & Mitchell, 2009). Also, those with high religious beliefs are susceptible to beliefs of homosexuality as a choice and have more negative views (Kendra, Christopher, Franzen, & Keyes, 2006; Herek, 2002). While attitudes about homosexuality and bisexuality have been shown to be related, bisexuality is distinct from homosexuality and deserves separate focus (Mohr & Rochlen, 1999). The current study expands past research by examining a variety of factors related to attitudes toward bisexuality, such as perceiving sexual orientation as a choice, religiosity, and amount and quality of contact. Our first hypothesis is that both the perception of sexual orientation as a choice and higher levels of religiosity will relate to more negative attitudes toward bisexuals. Next, both the quantity and quality of contact with sexual minorities will predict attitudes such that less contact and less quality contact will be related to more negative attitudes toward bisexuals. We collected data from 1725 (67.2% female) individuals through participation in an online survey. Results indicate negative attitudes towards bisexuality are significantly related to the perception of sexual orientation as a choice (r = .499, p < .01) higher levels of religiosity (r = .515, p < .01) and lower levels of contact with sexual minorities (r = -.547; p < .01) and quality of contact (r = -.617; p< .01). These findings and comparisons of these relations by self-identified sexual orientation will be presented.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Yes / Included in methods commonly used for assessing vocational training are oral assessments (OAs) since, in addition to assessing knowledge to a depth rarely achieved in other forms of testing, they give unique insight into students’ personal attitudes, which are important factors in the workplace. However, OAs require considerable preparation by the assessors, they can be restricted by time and assessor allocation, it is difficult to fully cover the course fairly, and they can put undue stress on the examinees, hence hindering a true expression of their skills and knowledge. OAs can give insight into a student’s personal attitudes, and the purpose here is to find the relationship between OA observed attitudes and those deduced from the computer-aided assessment. For the computer-aided assessments a scheme based on comparing two statements, followed by fuzzy AHP analysis, was used to determine the student’s attitude on such topics as general safety, work area tidiness and cleanliness, care and good use of hand tools and accuracy and testing of equipment. The results from the computer-aided approach were then compared with attitudes on the same topics obtained by oral assessment. For this work the important result was that there were strong correlations between the OA observed attitudes and the computer-aided assessment derived attitudes of the students. It also became clear however that for safety, the attitude of students (and perhaps workers) is more complicated than just having a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ attitude. Social pressure and organisational influence do seem to play a part so influencing or masking the student’s true attitudes. Satisfactory correlations were found between results of students’ attitudes when tested using the OA and computer-aided methods. Further work would need to be done to confirm generalization of substituting OA methods with a computer-aided assessment method.