The attitudes of American and Nigerian hospital personnel toward the aged were assessed. The samples (N = 144) were drawn from four hospitals in the United States and Nigeria. Two of the hospitals provide mainly psychiatric services, while the other two provide general medical care. A total of 21 bipolar semantic differential adjectives were selected and used to form 7-point rating scales. It was found that Nigerians have a significantly more positive attitude than Americans toward "old man" on the full scale and the evaluative subscale. There was no difference between the attitudes of general hospital and psychiatric hospital personnel.
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