The power to communicate effectively and respectfully in the health care setting promotes job satisfaction, retention, and healthy relationships. Ineffective communication is one of the major causes of sentinel events, incivility, nurse turnover, and workplace hostility in the health care environment. This project examined a communication competence educational program on a spinal cord injury (SCI) nursing department and its potential to improve communication competence. The project question explored whether an educational series on incivility and creating healthy relationships would increase communication competence in nurses on the SCI unit. The project used the high reliability solutions for health care model communications improvement and creative health care management tools. The oppressed group behavior theory was used to inform this project by providing an understanding of why nursing staff may experience hostility toward one another and lack effective communication skills to promote a healthy working environment. The dauntless survey questionnaire was used pre and posteducational intervention, and the results were analyzed to assess the effects of using descriptive statistics. The educational intervention reached 81 SCI nursing staff members. Results showed a 13% increase in the staff feelings of confidence when speaking up to their peers and physicians, a 3% increase in knowing what to say when difficult situations arose, and an 11% increase in feeling competent regarding their communication skills. The findings of this project may promote social change by improving communication by the team leader, charge nurse, assistance manager, and nursing staff during shift change, walking rounds, and huddles.

During the last decade higher education organizations and educational policy makers have substantially increased efforts to incentivize study abroad participation. These efforts are grounded in the longstanding belief that study abroad participation improves intercultural competence - an educational outcome critical in a globalized 21st century economy. Yet decades of evidence that appear to support this claim are repeatedly limited by a series of methodological weaknesses including small homogenous samples, an absence of longitudinal study design, no accounting for potential selection bias, and the lack of controls for potentially confounding demographic and college experience variables. Thus, a major competing explanation for differences found between students who do and do not study abroad continues to be the possibility that these differences existed prior to participation. The current study sought to determine the effect of study abroad on intercultural competence among 1,593 participants of the 2006 cohort of the Wabash National Study on Liberal Arts Education. The Wabash National Study is a longitudinal study of undergraduates that gathered pre- and post-test measures on numerous educational outcomes, an array of institutional and self-reported pre-college characteristics, and a host of college experiences. The current study employed both propensity score matching and covariate adjustment methods to account for pre-college characteristics, college experiences, the selection effect, and the clustered nature of the data to both cross-validate findings and provide guidance for future research. Under such rigorous analytic conditions, this study found that study abroad generated a statistically significant positive effect on intercultural competence; an effect that appears to be general rather than conditional. Moreover, both covariate adjustment and propensity score matching methods generated similar results. In examining the effect of study abroad across the three constituent subscales of the overall measure of intercultural competence, this study found that study abroad influences students' diversity of contact but has no statistically significant effect on relativistic appreciation of cultural differences or comfort with diversity. Finally, the results of this study suggest that the relationship between study abroad and intercultural competence is one of selection and accentuation, holding important implications for postsecondary policy makers, higher education institutions, and college impact scholars.

Abstract not available

This qualitative research project explored the experiences of nurse educators who sought to assess aspects, which could be related to facilitation of emotional competence, in nursing students. Focus groups were conducted in three different educational institutions, offering a Bachelor of nursing degree. Each of the participants had a teaching and assessment role within the school of nursing. The contributions of the nurse educators and their interactions were audio taped, transcribed and then later, analysed using thematic and focus group analysis practices.From the analysis of the experiences of the nurse educators, four predominant themes arose which capture the areas of importance to the participants. Student nurses can develop emotional competence by critically reflecting during classroom and clinical experiences. Continuous consideration must be made within each practicing area of nursing, of the environmental and relational challenges which inhibit or facilitate nurse's ability to practice with emotional competence. Educators and practicing nurses, who work alongside students, must uphold the expectation that emotional competence is a requisite ability and provide opportunities to foster emotional growth and skills to resolve conflict within the culture of nursing.A common view shared by the educators was that the profession of nursing needs to have a clear understanding of what constitutes emotional competence. Strategies to realistically incorporate emotional competence into the educational curriculum and competency based assessment opportunities within nursing education are required.Suggestions are presented from which undergraduate nursing education can facilitate development of emotional competence with those students working toward becoming a registered nurse. Emotional competence is suggested as an essential learning outcome in the movement toward transformative nursing education and a collaborative nursing profession.

ABSTRACT Cultural beliefs and values implicitly shape every aspect of the way we parent our children and how we communicate about parenting. For parents who are migrants and experiencing parenting in a new country it is essential that child and family health professionals better understand how the cultural self influences practice. Child and family health professionals work with families who come from cultures other than their own on a daily basis. How they communicate with these families is the subject of this ethnographic study into culture and communication in child and family health. Taking culture as its starting point this study explored the everyday communication experiences of child health professionals including child and family health nurses, social workers and doctors in a statewide child and family health service in South Australia. Data included participant observation, video and in-depth interview data. Drawing on insights from cultural studies including postcolonial and feminist scholarship the analysis showed that child health professionals attempted to use contemporary discourses of service provision such as partnership with enthusiasm and with genuine intent. However their application of partnership was limited by unexamined binary constructs within dominant pedagogic tools of culture and communication. Analysis showed that four key binaries structured the communication practice of participants in this study; public or private knowledge, ideologies of sameness or difference, organisational or professional philosophies of practice and the expert or partner in intercultural communication. Three body analysis is introduced as a strategy to work with these binary challenges that seem to present when practice attempts to incorporate theory without consideration of the contexts of use. The combination of postcolonial feminist critique and three body analysis stimulates an explicit examination of health care inequalities as they intersect with the ongoing effects of colonisation. Current professional strategies for working with people who are new arrivals or migrants to Australia focus on understanding differences associated with particular ethic and cultural groups. Despite much work being undertaken to understand difference, in practice this culturalist approach underpinned by a belief in the essential nature of human kind, has resulted in people who are migrants or new arrivals continuing to report poor communication by health professionals as a primary barrier to their health care. Theoretical analysis suggests that this approach ignores differences in power relations among ethnic groups and ultimately manifests in racism. Further, contemporary communication pedagogies in child and family health reinforce this inattention to relations of power when health professionals are instructed to communicate in ways that are regardless of difference. By advocating that people are treated the same, historic and situated issues of gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities are ignored. In this way binaries of sameness/difference are perpetuated. Those parents located in marginalised positions of difference experience inequities in health care. In this study, child and family health professionals frequently drew from their own personal experiences of parenting to determine the content of information given to new parents, and to inform their approach to intercultural communication. In doing so they unselfconsciously conflated their personal and professional pedagogies and presented all information as professional. Child and family health practices are deeply cultured. Many practices are not scientifically proven and as such do not fit comfortably with the rational scientific medical paradigm with which they are aligned. Where disciplinary knowledge can be assessed and evaluated, this study found that there was no equivalent place for the evaluation of understanding of cultural knowledge — it was assumed as universal. Deeply cultured personal information tendered by participants represents a normative world that is white, western, middle class and gendered. Participants did not recognise themselves as cultured, nor did they recognise the potential impact of bringing this unexamined cultural self into the professional encounter. This resulted in seepage of practice that was democratically racist. This is where outward commitments to justice equality and fairness paradoxically exist with conflicting personal ideologies of sameness. Challenged to find a place for these constructs to coexist participants outwardly identify with the organisationally preferred position of social justice or evidence-based practice. However, participant observation and discussion of practice demonstrated that when conflicting personal beliefs and values were left unattended they found ways of surreptitiously creeping into and shaping the consultation. It seems that modernist theories do not provide adequate ontological and epistemological understandings for working with, and valuing pluralism in multiculture. Rather they constrict and limit practice which leads to an unrecognised perpetuation of colonising agendas in child and family health. Findings from this study contribute to the growing need to find ways to work with and unsettle existing binaries of communication and culture. The methods also suggest ways forward to support change in practice leading to professional development that is mindful and regardful of plurality in culture and communication. Interweaving three body analyses with postcolonial feminism offers a decolonising strategy for application in the multiculture that is Australia. Due to the spatial and temporal spaces created by using three bodies alongside postcolonial feminism, this combination becomes a tangible approach to deconstruction, for child and family health professionals that is both theoretical and practical.

The purpose of this research is to discover how university lecturers in management subjects respond to the mix of local and international students in their classes. The aim is to develop a substantive theory based on a conceptual understanding of the main concern of lecturers working in a changing Higher Education context. The aim of developing theory rather than providing rich description led to the choice of Orthodox Grounded Theory as the methodology. Grounded Theory is an inductive methodology that provides the methods to conceptually generate the patterns that explain the behaviours of participants in the substantive area. This was relevant for the current research as I commenced with no explicit hypotheses and there was limited literature on the responses of university lecturers to teaching diverse groups of students, particularly a mix of local and international students. Interviews and observations were conducted with lecturers from both traditional and newer universities in Melbourne, and data analysed using open coding, categorising, constant comparison, theoretical sampling and coding, and frequent memoing. The main concern of respondents emerged as balancing professional capability with the requirements of a heterogeneous student population. The Basic Social Process and Core Category that resolves this concern is Maintaining Competence. Maintaining Competence is both a causal-consequence model, and a typology model consisting of four strategies � Distancing, Adapting, Clarifying and Relating. The emergent Grounded Theory of Maintaining Competence contributes to the extant literature, in particular the literature on professional competence, and the literature on teacher centred and student centred approaches and on contextual and contingency models of teaching. It adds to the latter by demonstrating the importance of the interplay of moderating variables, specifically Forces in the Lecturer and Forces in the Environment. The thesis adds also to the Grounded Theory literature in its explicit presentation of Orthodox Grounded Theory methods and its discussion of the research journey of a novice grounded theorist.

<p>A self-esteem that is contingent on affirmation from others leaves the individual psychologically vulnerable. A contingent self-esteem has been shown to be either relationship or competence based. The aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between relationship based self-esteem, competence based self-esteem, the under dimensions of those, and self-efficacy. Questionnaires were handed out to 69 university students. The results indicated that competence based self-esteem predicted a significantly low self-efficacy. Only some of the under dimensions were significant predictors. The vulnerability of the contingent self-esteem is discussed in the light of the findings.</p>

<p>Självkänsla, och särskilt strävan att öka självkänslan genom yttre bekräftelse, har visat sig vara en betydelsefull komponent för hälsa och välbefinnande. Kompetens- och relationsbaserad självkänsla är två typer av betingad självkänsla och den föreliggande studien fokuserade på betydelsen av dessa för upplevd stress samt självskattad psykisk och fysisk hälsa. En surveyundersökning genomfördes där 111 deltagare i åldrarna 19-64 år deltog. Resultatet visade att betingad självkänsla, särskilt den relationsbaserade, hade ett starkare samband med psykisk hälsa än fysisk. Det fanns även skillnader i psykisk hälsa beroende på kön, ålder och nivån av betingad självkänsla. Vidare diskuterades resultatet utifrån de tre hypoteserna vilka endast delvis bekräftades av informationen från de utförda analyserna. Studien motiverar till framtida forskning inom området.</p>

<p>Arbetslösheten är idag ett av resultaten av den pågående lågkonjunkturen. Att vara arbetslös kan kännas psykiskt påfrestande och i längden hota delar av den sociala kompetensen. Social kompetens kan kortfattat sägas handla om förmågan att möta och kommunicera med andra människor samt anpassa sig till nya miljöer. Syftet med studien var att undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan tiden som arbetslös och sociala kompetens i termerna bas- självkänsla, self-efficacy och empati samt hur situationen för den arbetslöse ser ut ifråga om hjälp och stöd från arbetsförmedlingen. En enkätundersökning genomfördes där 128 arbetslösa deltog. Resultatet visade att personer som varit arbetslösa en längre tid inte hade lägre social kompetens utifrån de utvalda delarna men att vissa av delarna enskilt påverkades av tiden som arbetslös vilket tas upp för diskussion tillsammans med resultatet av arbetsförmedlingens insatser för de arbetslösa.</p>

<p>This study investigates the teaching strategies of four teachers, and determines which teaching strategies give better results in mathematics at the middle school level? Result here means the knowledge level of the students. The result has been measured through leave out a mathematical test, which I leave out designed. Teaching strategies have been assessed through interviews with teachers and observations of their lessons.</p><p>My study shows that to go through the lessons thoroughly in the traditional way, and open discussions with the whole class are best for students achievements.</p><p>The information available, however, is too limited to draw some general conclusions, but my study can be seen more like a counter-example to the general praxis that is short lectures and individual assessment with one to one communication when teaching mathematics.</p>