Healthcare associated infections cause 75,000 to 80,000 deaths a year. Many are preventable with proper hand hygiene adherence (HHA). Worldwide, HHA range is between 40-60%, far below the 100% recommended. The purpose of this quantitative, cross-sectional, prospective study was to investigate any association between 15 demographic variables and HHA of ICU nurses. A convenience sample of 613 hand hygiene opportunities was collected by direct observation at each of 5ICUs (4 hospitals) in Texas for 8 consecutive hours each day for 3-5 days. The theoretical foundation guiding this study was the healthcare environment theory. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences software was used for descriptive and inferential analysis of data. An aggregated overall HHA rate of 64.09% was identified among all nurses, 66.88% among male nurses and 62.27% among female nurses. Number of children, age of the nurse, number of years of living in the U.S., and the number of years of active nursing practice were significantly associated with HHA (p = .000) using paired sample t-test. The potential social change impact of this study is identifying variables associated with HHA, identification and measurement of 4 barriers to HHA, measuring the Hawthorne Effect, identification of Low Gelers, High Gelers, and Super Gelers, average rate may not be indicative of what is happening in hospital, and call for standardization of surveillance methodology. Findings may lead to specific interventions to increase HHA among nurses with certain demographic characteristics.

This thesis identifies a claimant narrative tradition in nineteenth-century American literature and examines the role of that tradition in the formation of American national identity. Drawing on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The American Claimant Manuscripts and Our Old Home (1863) as well as Mark Twain’s The American Claimant (1892), I argue that these writers confronted the paradoxical nature of claimant narratives—what Hawthorne called a “peculiar insanity”—which combined a hereditary sympathy between the United States and Britain with exceptionalist rhetoric about American republican values. Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward the claimant tradition identified the paradox, but his writing merely pointed out inconsistencies, while Twain censured with satire and direct social criticism. America’s British sympathies persisted in later decades, and remained a popular subject of fiction throughout the century, making it ripe for parody by the time Twain wrote his own claimant story. Claimant narratives reinforced class differences in the United States even as they appeared to reject them. The transnational framework of Twain’s novel affords a pointed critical view revealing the latent cruelty of democracy when coupled with attitudes of exceptionalism.

<p>This thesis approaches the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne from a narratological paradigm, arguing that metafiction is one of the primary elements of Hawthorne’s style and literary project as a Romantic author. Metafiction informs his themes, characters and aesthetics as Hawthorne is majorly concerned with bridging the gap between author and reader, text and physical book, and ultimately, the imaginary and the real. Hawthorne is incessant in his assertions about his work being authored works of fiction, and becomes concerned about readers properly receiving his fiction as authored literary surface. Engaging with and incorporating the work of major literary theorists such as Frye, Booth, Genette and Todorov—as well as new, emergent critics of Hawthorne—this study carefully examines his major novels, a number of his tales and sketches, and his paratextual materials. Metafiction is rarely considered in much of the scholarship discussing Hawthorne’s style, and is a convenient way of unifying many aspects of his style that have been previously fractured, including the distance and delicacy of his narration and voice, his experiments in genre, and his techniques of framing and diegesis.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This study is an examination of the developing self-consciousness of three female protagonists in three different novels. Chapter One is a discussion of the detrimental social factors that hinder the complete selfdevelopment of Hester Prynne in the seventeenth-century New England environment of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Chapter Two investigates the emerging consciousness of self of Edna Pontellier and her subsequent failure to achieve an autonomy that permits her to integrate into the confining, social climate of Chopin's nineteenth-century Creole environment in The Awakening. Chapter three is the examination of the repressive forces in the futuristic society of Gilead that serve as a barrier to the development of a unified self for Offred in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In all three chapters of the thesis, I argue that each female protagonist's struggle to successfully assert the self, and to extend the self toward genuine relationships with others, is not actualized. This study attempts to show the precarious hold of the self that the female protagonist demonstrates in each of these three works of fiction. Throughout the body of the text, an abbreviated form iii iv will be used for the three primary novels examined. The reference consists of the underlined initials of the title of the novel followed by the page number, all contained within parentheses. The abbreviations are as follows: TSL for Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, TA for Chopin's The Awakening, and THT for Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.</p> / Master of English

This dissertation deals with the symbolic uses of the prominent old houses in selected fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and Henry James. The major texts include Hawthorn's "Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure," The House of Seven Gables, and Doctor Grimshawe's Secret; Dicken's Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Little Dorrit; and James's The Portrait of a Lady, "The Jolly Corner," and The Sense of the Past. The introductory chapter of the dissertation points out the importance of the house in nineteenth-century fiction. To a century which was obsessed with time and particularly fascinated by the past, the house could serve as a literary symbol of the past and aid in the investigation of the relation of a character to the past he has experienced and the past he remembers with various degrees of accuracy. For Hawthorne, Dickens, and James the house is always more than inanimate space. It is linked by imagination and memory to the past. Chapter II identifies and defines the house of the imagined past. The house has a name and a long history which illuminates the present situation of the inhabitants. All three authors draw freely from the gothic tradition to fill the houses with old relics, curses, secrets, sins, and treasures from the past. Seeking the treasure--hidden gold in some cases, self-knowledge in others--the characters keep the past alive in their old houses. The character in the house of the imagined past is often fragmented because he does not understand or accept his relation with his own past. Time inside the house of the past is arbitrary. The past, or certain imagined or remembered portions of it dominate the space. Chapter III concerns the functions of the house. First, the actual fact of the house's existence generates action in the works. Second, the physical relation to his house suggests aspects of the character's spiritual state. The characters search and probe, even assault their houses, seeking themselves. Third, all three authors continually emphasize parallels between houses and people. Characters voluntarily imprison themselves in their houses just as they willingly imprison themselves in their interpretations of the past. The house also suggests that the past lives into and influences the present by means of heredity and environment. In addition, the physical state of the house mirrors the spiritual state of the characters: morally sick people inhabit decaying houses. Even further, houses become animated, metonymic representations of their inhabitants. The house of the past, then, projects or represents the character's mind. In Chapter IV I deal with the final return to and departure from the house of the imagined past. Finally the characters recognize the imprisoning nature of their obsessions and can then leave the house of the past or as happens in many cases, can be rescued by a woman who lives in the present. Hawthorne's characters turn their backs on the past with relief and turn to the present. Dickens's characters must know the past, accept it, and build on it, not simply turn away as Hawthorne's characters do. James allows his characters to close the door of the house of the past behind them if they can find love in the present. If domestic happiness is impossible, however, the broad human past can offer imagined solace and relief. The final chapter points out that Hawthorne, Dickens, and James, like many other authors, recognize archetypal and psychological relationships between a human and the space he inhabits. They use the house to understand the self, especially in relation to the past.

American policing is shaped by an array of challenges. Police are expected to address crime and engage the community, yet police are held to higher expectations of accountability, effectiveness, and efficiency than ever before. Police legitimacy is the ability of the police to exercise their authority in the course of maintaining order, resolving conflicts, and solving problems (PERF, 2014). The procedural justice and police legitimacy literature suggest that by exhibiting procedurally just behaviors within police-citizen encounters, officers are considered legitimate by the public (PERF, 2014; Tyler, 2004, Tyler & Jackson, 2012). This study examines procedural justice through systematic observations of police-citizen encounters recorded by body worn cameras in one mid-Atlantic police agency. The four elements of procedural justice (participation, neutrality, dignity and respect, and trustworthiness) are assessed to examine police behavior and its outcomes. The research questions concern how police acting in procedurally just ways may influence citizen behaviors. Descriptive statistics indicate high levels of procedural justice. Regression analyses suggest that procedural justice may predict positive citizen behaviors within police-citizen encounters. This study highlights the significance of procedural justice as an antecedent to police legitimacy and offers a new mode of observation: body worn camera footage.

This study examines the ritual of tarring and feathering within specific American cultural contexts and literary works of the nineteenth-century to show how the discourse surrounding the actual and figurative practice functioned as part of a larger process of discursive and visual racialization. The study illustrates how the practice and discourse of blackening white bodies enforced embodiment, stigmatized imagined interiority, and divorced the victims from inalienable rights. To be tarred and feathered was to be marked as anti-social, duplicitous and even anarchic. The study examines the works of major American authors including John Trumbull, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, analyzing how their works evidence a larger national conflation of character, race, and morality. Sometimes drawing on racial imagery implicitly, and sometimes engaging in the issues of race and slavery explicitly, their works feature tarring and feathering to portray their anxieties about social coercion and victimization in the context of the “experiment” of democracy. Trumbull’s mock-epic genre satirizes the plight of the Tory and diminishes the forms of the revolution; Cooper’s novel works as a rhetorical vehicle to prevent a perceived downfall of the republic; the short fiction of Poe exaggerates the horror of uneven and racialized power relations; and Hawthorne’s body of work ironizes the original parody of tar and feathers to expose the violent nature of democratic foundation. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach, this first, in-depth study of tarring and feathering in America reveals that the ritual is a fertile ground for understanding the multivalent social constructs of the time. Examining tarring and feathering incidents can tell scholars about the status of racial feeling, moral values (including sexual and gender norms), and economic fissures of the context in which they occur. Abjecting the body of the victim, the act rewrites the individual’s relationship to the body politic, and the performance of the ritual reveals the continuously emergent, publically sanctioned forms of belonging to the community and the nation. Moreover, examining the representation of tarring and feathering can tell scholars about an author’s relationship to the ideology of an American way.

Thesis (All-College Honors) - - State University of New York College at Cortland, [2006] - - Department of English. / Includes bibliographical references (p.49-50).

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