Parette, Hourcade and Parette (1990) report that:
Nurses play a critical role in public education regarding the assessment of medical problems related to alcoholism or alcohol abuse. Nurses must assess their personal attitudes toward the disease concept of alcoholism before they can effectively provide services to geriatric patients who are alcoholics or who abuse alcohol. Among the geriatric population, there is a constellation of medical problems related to alcoholism and alcohol abuse. Potentially dysfunctional attitudes exist among nurses and other health-care professionals who are involved in the provision of medical care to geriatric patients who have alcoholism or who abuse alcohol. (p. 26)
In other words, a major function of the nursing role is to provide geriatric alcoholics with both treatment and prevention services and it is likely that dysfunctional attitudes may impair this care. In order to examine Parette, Hourcade and Parette's (1990) claim regarding the possibility of dysfunctional attitudes toward geriatric alcoholism in the nursing profession, this
thesis examined the attitudes of a group of community health nurses toward elderly alcohol abuse.
Further, because of the substantial research establishing that attitudes systematically covary with sociodemographic characteristics of the attitude holder (see: Lindgren & Harvey, 1996), the thesis also investigated whether nurse attitudes toward geriatric alcoholism significantly differed depending upon several nurse sociodemographic variables including: age; gender; religion/religiosity; and number of years working as a nurse.
The elderly is the fastest growing population in the United States; indeed, it is estimated that by 2010, people aged 65 years and older will comprise almost 14 percent of the American population (Papalia & Olds, 1995). These statistics are better understood if it is recognized that in the early 1900s, only 1 out of every 25 ...