Representativeness and Diversity in Mental Health Attitudes

We conducted an online study using a panel provider¹ that recruited a sample representative for the German population in terms of age and gender (N = 297; 18–83 years of age, 52% female) for this study. An open-text item was used to assess participants’ current employment. The answers reflect a high degree of occupational and educational diversity of the sample: Retired 29.05%, in school, training, or university 7.09%, blue-collar worker 6.42%, white-collar worker 6.42%, without work and on parental leave 5.74%, freelancer 3.72%, specialized worker 3.38%, salesperson/distributor 3.38%, administration 2.70%, technician 2.36%, teacher 2.03%, nursing/medical staff 2.03%, consultant 1.69%, pedagogue 1.69%, CEO/owner 1.35%, engineer 1.35%, and many more. 3.7% of the sample (11 participants) stated that they themselves were affected by the disorder they assessed (5 with MDD, 2 with ADD and 1 with phobia, anorexia and kleptomania respectively). 42.74% of the sample (127 participants) stated that they know someone with the respective disorder in their social environment. 53.54% of the sample (159 participants) stated that neither themselves nor someone in their social environment was affected by the disorder. The participants reported an average personal contact with people with the respective disorders of 2.17 [SD = 1.11; “How do you rate your personal experience with people with (mental disorder)?”; 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1: very little to 5: a lot of contact] and an average expert knowledge about the disorders of 2.16 [SD = 1.08; “How do you rate your expert knowledge of people with (mental disorder)?”; 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1: very little to 5: high degree of expert knowledge]. The study was conceptualized as a between-subject design, in that participants answered questions concerning one of eight disorders (MDD, phobia, OCD, BPD, ADD, anorexia, schizophrenia and kleptomania). Following previous studies applying the SCM (e.g., Cuddy et al., 2004 (link); Caprariello et al., 2009 (link)), we chose a between-subject design to avoid that participants make their judgments in comparison to the other included disorders (sensitivity effects). Furthermore, the between-subject design was chosen to minimize consistency effects (striving for a contradiction-free response), practice and fatigue effects, as well as demand characteristics (guessing the hypotheses) that are common to within-designs. Participants were randomly assigned to one condition/mental disorder, resulting in the following distribution: Schizophrenia 11%, MDD 16%, ADD 11%, OCD 16%, BPD 10%, phobia 11%, anorexia 12%, and kleptomania 13%.