Supported employment has been shown to be an effective way to contribute to the community reintegration of persons with disabilities. Traditionally, the hiring practice for supported employment staffs has focused on individuals with social service training; however, it has been proposed that employment specialists need to possess advanced skills that tend to be emphasized in business training programs. This study uses several new measures to identify differences in attitudes toward vocational rehabilitation and readiness and aptitude for a supported employment position, of social service and business students. Results indicate that social service students possess higher levels of clinical readiness and aptitude and more favorable attitudes toward vocational rehabilitation than do business students. Nevertheless, business students' readiness, attitudes, and aptitude are above theoretical neutral points, and comparable to those of social service students, and thus, effort should be devoted to diversifying the workforce by recruiting individuals with business training. / Department of Psychological Science

The aim of this study was to validate an instrument that can be used by instructors or social scientist who are interested in evaluating statistics anxiety. The psychometric properties of the English version of the Statistical Anxiety Scale (SAS) was examined through a confirmatory factor analysis of scores from a sample of 323 undergraduate social science majors enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States. In previous studies, the psychometric properties of the Spanish and Italian versions of the SAS were validated; however, the English version of the SAS had never been assessed. Inconsistent with previous studies, scores on the English version of the SAS did not produce psychometrically acceptable values of validity. However, the results of this study suggested the potential value of a revised two-factor model SAS to measure statistics anxiety. Additionally, the Attitudes Towards Statistics (ATS) scale was used to examine the convergent and discriminant validities of the two-factor SAS. As expected, the correlation between the two factors of the SAS and the two factors of the ATS uncovered a moderately negative correlation between examination anxiety and attitudes towards the course. Additionally, the results of a structural regression model of attitudes towards statistics as a predictor of statistics anxiety suggested that attitudes towards the course and attitudes towards the field of statistics moderately predicts examination anxiety with attitudes towards the course having the greatest influence. It is recommended that future studies examine the relationship between attitudes towards statistics, statistics anxiety, and other variables such as academic achievement and instructional style.