Effects of rational behavior training on attitudes of rehabilitation support personnel

This study was designed to measure positive changes in attitudes and cognitive distortion, of support rehabilitation personnel of the Texas Rehabilitation Commission, after training in Rational Behavior Therapy (RBT). The study was conducted during the summer of 1990 with 22 female subjects ranging in age from 24 to 52 years. Educational level was 13 grades, with mean years of work with the Texas Rehabilitation Commission and in comparable work, the same, at 7.6 years. The Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test, used for both instruments, showed high significance for two of the Bloom Sentence Completion Survey's (BSCS) seven individual tests used to measure positive attitudes. These were Psychological and Physical at the p 0.007 level. The Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS) scores indicated a significant decrease, at the p 0.001 level, in cognitive distortion following RBT intervention. An additional finding was that the training helped most those individuals scoring highest in cognitive distortion. Of the upper half of the subjects, 91% improved after training. The Spearman rank correlation coefficient, measuring correlation between the two instruments (the DAS and the seven individual tests of the BSCS), determined that only one of the individual tests of the BSCS, Psychological, correlated with the DAS.