Data were analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics 20 (Armonk, NY, USA). To investigate whether and how mental health nursing staff’s attitudes towards persons with mental illness were related to the hypothetical independent variables: staff members’ age, gender, education level, personal contact (currently or ever lived with, worked with, neighbour with, friend with someone with mental health problems), stigma-related knowledge (MAKS) and employer/ work places multiple regression analyses (Enter) and linear generalized estimating equation (GEE) were carried out. GEE was used to account for unknown correlations in the data (within units), as the staff represented 32 different units. The staff also represented two different organizations, and thus we analysed potential differences between staff working in the county council and staff working in municipalities using independent t-tests and Chi-square test. Missing data in the CAMI-S and MAKS were replaced with the group means. Significance levels of 0.05 were set for all tests.