Interdisciplinary Gerontology Education:

Negative attitudes toward older people are thought to impact social policies and service provision, cause adverse medical and mental health treatment of older persons, and diminish self-esteem and feelings of adequacy, usefulness, and security of older people. Research on gerontology education as a change agent of attitudes toward aging has yielded mixed results-predominantly due to the variety of dimensions of attitudes measured by diverse attitude instruments. The present research employed by the Aging Opinion Survey to explore the impact of an introductory interdisciplinary gerontology course on three dimensions of attitudes toward aging. Matched pretest and posttest responses of 115 subjects at a state university were obtained. Analyses of t-tests revealed that subjects experienced significant positive changes in attitudes toward older people in general (t = 3.06, p < .001) and in attitudes toward familiar elders (t = 3.06, p < .003). No significant attitude change occured in personal anxiety about aging. Implications for applied gerontology education and research are discussed.