In addition to standard demographic information, participants’ familiarity with mental illness was assessed at baseline. The Level of Familiarity Index is a 12-item assessment of people’s experience with people with severe mental illness. Each item is rank ordered according to the level of intimacy with 1 being ‘‘little intimacy’’ to 12 being ‘‘highest intimacy.’’ The score reported is the rank score of the most intimate situation indicated. If a person checks more than one item, their highest rank is scored. This index developed by Holmes, Corrigan, Williams, Canar, & Kubiak, (1999) was validated by three mental health experts with an interrater reliability of 0.83