Abstract
The revised Attitudes toward Employment of Psychiatric Disability scale (ATEP II) was developed for the assessment of transport sector employers' attitudes toward employing people with psychiatric disability in order to assist researchers and practitioners in supporting employers. In total, 478 employers representing seven Japanese transport industries classified by the Japan Standard Industrial Classification were surveyed by questionnaire. Factor analysis yielded the following nine factors associated with employment of people with psychiatric disability: employer motivation for hiring, activity limitation, trustworthiness, employer motivation for making preparation of hiring, attention distribution, prejudice and fear, self-efficacy for managing employment, advantages of hiring, and recruitment standards based on capacity. Moderately high or high Cronbach alphas and testretest reliability coefficients indicated that scores from the ATEP II are internally consistent and stable when measuring multidimensional attitudes of transport sector employers. The results of one-way ANOVA or two-tailed t-tests suggested that differences in attitudes differ among transport sector employers according to the organizational characteristics (whether or not employers run businesses other than transport, the number of regular workers, the number of workers with disabilities), regular worker characteristics (length of employment, educational qualifications of regular workers) and individual characteristics (age, whether or not employers are in managerial posts, prior experience employing people with disabilities). Therefore, the seven industrial classifications that comprise the transport industry were not critical factors differentiating employer attitudes within the transport sector. The results of a multiple regression analysis suggested that in the transport sector, employer motivation for employing people with psychiatric disability is correlated with recruitment standards based on capacity, advantages of hiring, fear, prejudice, and whether or not employers run businesses other than transport. In order to provide effective support for employers, future research should include confirmatory factor analysis to ensure the construct validity of ATEP II and an investigation of significant ATEP II subscales.
