A Comparative Study of the Effects of Two In-Service Training Programs on Attitude Change in Rehabilitation Practitioners

• Main Author: Welch, David U.
• Other Authors: Cooper, Jed Arthur
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: North Texas State University 1977
• Subjects: in-service training; rehabilitation practitioners; Rehabilitation counselors > In-service training.; Attitude change.
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc331615/

The problem of this study was to investigate the comparative effects of two in-service training programs on the attitudes of rehabilitation practitioners. There were two experimental groups, the consecutive three-day program and the two-week program, and one control group in the study. The two-week program was staggered, having training for five days, a three-week interval, and the remaining five days of training. The two programs were compared to determine which was more effective in altering rehabilitation practitioner attitudes. Conclusions were drawn from the experimental study and related literature review. They were that in-service training programs of two days and less will probably not produce significant attitude changes; in-service programs of three days to five days have a higher probability of producing significant attitude changes; in-service programs of two weeks to six weeks will probably produce less of a positive change than a program of less than two weeks but longer than two days; an in-service program of ten weeks to one year will probably produce less significant changes in attitudes than a shorter program; the shorter the in-service program (i.e., less than ten weeks and more than two days) the greater the probability of gaining significant attitude changes; the critical hour of significant attitude change appears to be around the twenty-fourth hour; and, in attitude change research, instead of measuring training by days across weeks or months, the variable to examine is the total number of hours of training.