Brain Injury Lawyer

This weekend I finally had an opportunity to catch up on some reading. In particular, I was able to fully read the November issue of Brain Injury. As you will recall, in a past blog, I promised to digest a number of the articles.

I was most interested by an article which looked at public attitudes toward survivors of brain injury. According to the abstract, the primary objective of the paper was to explore the effects of religious identity, gender and socioeconomic status on public attitudes toward survivors of brain injury. The study was conducted in northern Ireland and compared the attitudes of northern Irish participants. The authors reported that their findings supported the hypothesis that males and females would express different attitudes toward survivors of brain injury. "Without exception, females were found to hold fewer tolerant attitudes than males." This finding was opposite to the literature on attitudes toward the mentally ill which indicates that females hold more tolerant attitudes than males. The authors speculated that the negative attitudes expressed by women in this study were based on a lack of understanding and fear of survivors of brain injury.

The study also partially supported the hypothesis that significant differences would be found between Catholics and Protestants. "The significant interaction between religious identity and gender, on the factor of social restrictiveness, indicates that Protestant males held more positive attitudes toward survivors of brain injury than Catholic males."

The final hypothesis of the study that significant differences would exist between individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds was also partially supported. The significant interaction between gender and socioeconomic status on the factor of benevolence showed that males with high socioeconomic status held more positive attitudes toward survivors of brain injury than males with low economic status. "This suggests that males with high SES felt survivors of brain injury were deserving of more sympathy and were more willing to become personally involved than males with low SES."

As the authors noted, the issue of age was not taken into consideration.

The November issue also included an interesting article on potential jurors' perceptions of brain damage in mild traumatic brain injury. The study, conducted by T.J. Guilmette and his colleagues was designed to determine the influence of victims/plaintiff's sex, occupation and intoxication status at the time of injury on potential jurors' judgment about the presence of brain damage in mild TBI injury. The authors gathered 460 participants and presented them with eight scenarios. Victims' sex, occupation and alcohol intoxication status at the time of the injury were manipulated across the eight scenarios. Participants rated whether the victim's complaints at six months post injury were the result of brain damage.

The authors concluded "The occupational and intoxication status of MTBI victims may influence potential jurors' decision about the presence of brain damage." According to the authors, the results suggested that the general population is less likely to believe that a symptomatic MTBI survivor has sustained brain damage from a motor vehicle accident when the survivor has a lower status occupation or when the survivor was intoxicated at the time of the injury. Interestingly, the sex of the survivor did not influence the juror's belief in the presence or nonpresence of brain damage. The authors do caution that the findings do not suggest what decision jurors would make in MTBI civil trial after hearing all the evidence, but rather caution that the results should be interpreted as reflecting potential juror's pre-trial beliefs after occupational and intoxication status relative to a claim of brain damage from an MTBI individual. The authors note, surprisingly, that the majority of participants in all case scenarios believe that the MTBI survivor's complaints were the result of brain damage from the accident. The authors explain this finding that perhaps "When persons are answering questions about brain injury in the abstract, their views are more critical than when responding to a credible scenario of a ‘real' MTBI case."

Brain Injury is the official journal of the International Brain Injury Association and can be obtained free with a membership to IBIA.