SCALING COMMUNITY ATTITUDES TOWARD THE MENTALLY ILL

Purpose

This archival website provides user documentation for the Community Attitudes to Mental Illness (CAMI) survey instrument.

Use of the CAMI scale is freely granted but potential users are requested to provide appropriate acknowledgement of the CAMI source, and to record in detail any change(s) made to the original instrument.

Introduction

The ‘Community Attitudes to Mental Illness’ (or CAMI) scale was developed in the late 1970s by Martin Taylor and Michael Dear, professors of geography at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

The survey goal was to measure and explain the bases for neighborhood opposition to community-based mental health facilities in Toronto, Canada. Although techniques for measuring attitudes already existed, CAMI was the first instrument that specifically designed to address attitudes in residential neighborhoods where such facilities existed or were being proposed.

Since that time, the CAMI scale has been in continuous use and applied in many settings world-wide. The original survey acts as a bench-mark for these subsequent studies.

The terminologies employed in the CAMI scale (such as “mental illness”) are consistent with the linguistic conventions of the time, and remain unaltered in this documentation.

The CAMI scale was developed with support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

DOWNLOAD THE CAMI SCALE

Authors

Martin Taylor, PhD, FCAHS, is Executive Director of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network at McMaster University; and Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Michael Dear, PhD, FLSW, is Professor Emeritus in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley; and Honorary Professor in the Bartlett School of Planning at University College, London.