Measures for assessing student attitudes toward older people

Measuring medical and allied health students' attitudes towards older people has been identified as an important research area. The present study compared the use of implicit and explicit attitude measures. Sixty five undergraduates completed one explicit measure, the Fraboni Scale of Ageism (FSA), (Fraboni, Saltstone, & Hughes, 1990) and one implicit measure, the Implicit Association Test. They had positive explicit and neutral implicit attitudes towards older people, suggesting more positive attitudes than previously reported. These attitudes were related but there were discrepancies. Because explicit measures are likely to be influenced by factors such as social desirability, the implicit measure might be a more reliable measure.