Attitudes of Preventive Care Specialists and Registered Dietitians Toward Their Obese Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to compare preventive care specialists and registered dietitians regarding attitudes toward obese patients, to compare both groups with Canadian and American nurses previously studied, and to determine whether relationships exist between personal characteristics and attitudes toward obese patients. Questionnaires were sent to members of the American Preventive Care Association and 1,000 randomly selected members of the California Dietetic Association. Sixty-seven preventive care specialists and 579 registered dietitians participated in the study. A modified version of the Attitudes Toward Obesity scale, developed by Bagley, et al. was used to measure attitudes. Preventive care specialists and registered dietitians differed significantly on only two of twenty questions measuring attitudes toward obese patients. Preventive care specialists were slightly more likely to think that obese adult patients should be confronted if found cheating on their diet. Registered dietitians were slightly more likely to prefer not to work with obese adults. When responses of preventive care specialists, registered dietitians, and American and Canadian nurses were compared on five statements regarding obese adults, registered dietitians tended to hold the least prejudiced attitudes. A factor analysis divided questionnaire items into five factors: Dislike Obese, Weight Loss through Self-Control, Obese are Hard to Work With, Obese Have Negative Emotions, and Obese are Like Others. Relationships were found between personal characteristics of respondents and the factors, Dislike Obese, Weight Loss through Self-Control, and Obese are Like Others. Subjects who were registered dietitians, did not hold graduate degrees, and spent less time working with obese patients helping them lose weight tended to score higher on the factor, Dislike Obese. Preventive care specialists scored higher on the factor, Weight Loss through Self-Control. Asians appeared to believe that self-control is more important than either Caucasians or Hispanics. Practitioners who spent more time with eating disorder patients scored higher on the factor, Obese are Like Others. Prejudice toward the obese may be predicted by a belief that obesity can be prevented through self-control. Training programs for preventive care specialists and registered dietitians should address attitudes toward patients that might decrease professional efficacy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".