Status Resources, Societal Reactions, and Type of Mental Hospital Admission

This paper reports on a test of the status resource hypothesis of type of mental hospitalization (voluntary vs. involuntary). Findings are based on all 21-64 year-old first admissions to all state mental hospitals in Tennessee between 1956 and 1965. Analysis based on the linear probability estimation model (Grizzle et al., 1969) consistently supports the hypothesis. The analysis also supports two interaction hypotheses, namely, that the effect of status resources varies depending on psychiatric status and level of behavioral deviance.