Full breakdown of the sample by profession is in Table 2.
Adults were a random sample of professions (i.e., as a group, they were not selected to be school teachers [11], [12] or otherwise to have any specific expertise with children).
Most studies conducted till now did not use valid and reliable measurement tools for the measurement of attitudes, did not use very large samples and did not sample many professions.
Paediatricians were most highly represented within the study sample, reflecting the profession's key role in diagnosis in Australia.
However, the findings of the present study might be transferable to similar contexts in CHC as the sample of the profession represents all nurses employed at CHCs exclusively, and the sample of CHCs represents both urban and rural areas, including those with a large number of immigrants.
Additionally, recruitment of participants targeted a broad sampling of "helping profession" workers.
Maximum heterogeneity in the sample (e.g., professions, regions, administrative areas, relation to the affected person, age, and gender) will be strived for.
(4) Our studied population is a sample of different professions in the English health care system and caution should be exercised in applying our findings in other mental health systems.
The study sample varied by health profession sampling criteria.
After sample stratification according to profession, the values for Cronbach's α was 0.739 for nurses and 0.760 for doctors (see also Additional file 2).
An analysis of the drop-outs showed no differences between responders and the entire sample in terms of profession or gender, except that the proportion of GPs was lower among the responders (12.6%) than in the entire sample (20.5%).
