Well-being and self-efficacy in a sample of undergraduate nurse students: A small survey study.

This paper reports findings from a survey which aimed to explore well-being and self-efficacy and test measures of those constructs with a sample of nurse students in a University setting in the United Kingdom. Evidence indicates that undergraduate nurse programmes combine academic work and clinical placement experience in a mix that can potentially lead to stress and impact on health and well-being. Self-efficacy is known to be a resource that contributes to well-being, resilience and academic achievement and therefore relevant for investigation. A cross-sectional survey approach was used to obtain data using a paper questionnaire including the BBC Well-being Scale and Generalised Self-efficacy Scale. A total of n=108 undergraduate preregistration nurse students participated in this small study from a potential population of 450. The majority of participants (86%) were female, and the majority (75%) were aged 17-35years old. Mean and subscale scores were calculated for both instruments and inferential analyses were carried out using non-parametric techniques. Exploratory factor analyses of the BBC Well-being Scale indicated a three factor structure consistent with validation study findings. Cronbach's alpha was α=.92 for the BBC Well-being Scale and α=.85 for the GSE suggesting that the instruments are valid and reliable measures for nurse education research. Nurse students indicated higher scores on the BBC Well-being Scale and the GSE compared with previously studied populations and a small but significant positive correlation was found between psychological well-being and self-efficacy. Cluster analysis indicated discrete student communities in this sample that varied in their Well-being and GSE scale and subscale scores. Self-efficacy and general well-being in nurse students are worthy of further study and relevant to contemporary nurse education given current interest in interventions to promote student retention and resilience post-registration.

Inclusive fitness theory and eusociality.

Arising from M. A. Nowak, C. E. Tarnita & E. O. Wilson 466, 1057-1062 (2010); Nowak et al. reply. Nowak et al. argue that inclusive fitness theory has been of little value in explaining the natural world, and that it has led to negligible progress in explaining the evolution of eusociality. However, we believe that their arguments are based upon a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory and a misrepresentation of the empirical literature. We will focus our comments on three general issues.

Nursing students as research participants: a framework for ethical practice.

AIM: The aim is to discuss a new framework that can aid ethical decision making in educational nursing research. BACKGROUND: Nurse researchers have a significant amount of guidance to inform their ethical decision making in relation to research. However, research governance and professional guidance only go so far in promoting ethical research practice. Nurse researchers who work in higher education institutes face particular ethical challenges when nursing students are used as research participants. METHOD: We explore the complexities of educational research and introduce a framework that can help nurse researchers to make ethically sound research decisions. We draw inspiration from Wendler and Grady (2008) [Wendler, D., Grady, C., 2008. What should research participants understand to understand they are participants in research? Bioethics, 22(4), 203-208] who explored the issue of informed consent in bioethical research. They proposed three key issues that researchers need to consider: research contribution; research relationship and research impact. Inspired by their work, we have developed the Framework for Ethical Research Practice for use in a nursing context. Using examples from our research, we show how the framework can be a useful tool for nurse researchers to assist them in making ethically sound research decisions. CONCLUSION: This new framework should appeal to researchers seeking innovative ways of enhancing the ethical realm of their practice.

The impact on parents of a child's admission to intensive care: integration of qualitative findings from a cross-sectional study.

OBJECTIVES: In this study, parents were asked which aspects of their experience of having a child in intensive care had caused them the most distress and how they continued to be affected by these experiences. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: Semi-structured interviews held with 32 mothers and 18 fathers of children admitted to a paediatric intensive care unit 8 months earlier, were audiotaped, transcribed and subjected to a thematic analysis. SETTING: The setting was an eight-bed paediatric intensive care unit in an inner city teaching hospital. RESULTS: Significant themes included the vividness of parents' memories of admission; the intensity of distress associated with times of transition and the lasting impact of their experience, in terms both of the ongoing need to protect their child and in relation to their priorities in life. Fathers reported different coping strategies, spent less time on the unit and were less likely than mothers to report fearing that their child would die. CONCLUSIONS: Parents report significant and persisting distress. Further research is needed on how best to support them acutely and in the longer term.

Computer-assisted software transcription of qualitative interviews.

John Alcock and Ron Iphofen examine a method to assist with interview transcription using free, open source computer software and digital recordings, and consider some underlying practical, ethical and philosophical issues.

Planning for pandemic influenza.

This article summarises current knowledge about avian (H5N1) and pandemic influenza and highlights recommendations for healthcare workers caring for infected patients.

Genetic breeding system and investment patterns within nests of Dawson's burrowing bee (Amegilla dawsoni) (Hymenoptera: Anthophorini).

Dawson's burrowing bee is a large solitary ground-nesting bee endemic to the arid zone of Western Australia. In this study, we use microsatellite markers to analyse the genotypes of offspring from individual nests to determine the number of effective mates for each female. From these data we have determined that females almost certainly mate only once which is consistent with male reproductive tactics that include protandry and intense male-male competition for access to virgin females. We also use the molecular data to show that the nesting female is the mother of all the offspring of her nest and that brood parasitism is unlikely in this species. The data indicate that females make daughters at the beginning of the season followed by large sons in the middle, and then small sons at the end. Females often place one brood cell directly above another. The distribution of sex and morph in these doublets follows a pattern with most containing a female on the bottom and a minor male on the top, followed by almost equal numbers of female on top of female and minor male on top of major male. This pattern is likely favoured by emergence patterns, with males emerging before females and minor males emerging before major males. We suggest that although minor males have low reproductive success, their production may nonetheless be beneficial in that minor males open up emergence tunnels for their larger and reproductively more valuable siblings. In addition, minor males may be a best of a bad job product arising from changes in the costs to nesting females of gathering brood provisions over the course of the flight season.

Development of a wilderness and travel medicine rotation in an academic setting.

Wilderness medicine courses tend to teach similar topics, but they can differ with respect to philosophy, teaching methods, and financing. Our not-for-profit course is academically based and is similar to other programs with regard to presentations of didactic material and outdoor training, but there are also important differences in teaching methodology that are not used by other programs to date. Innovative methods, such as problem-based learning and use of the human patient simulator, which are unique to our program, have been successful in our courses and may be of use to wilderness medical education. We hope that sharing information about our program will help make wilderness medicine training more standardized and uniform.

Lifetime resource utilization, flight physiology, and the evolution of contest competition in territorial insects.

Adaptationist analyses of animal contests have contributed much to our understanding of behavioral evolution. One class of contest, however, the war of attrition, has proven difficult to interpret. In wars of attrition involving aerial displays, there is evidence that asymmetries in performance parameters such as flight energetics may be important determinants of contest resolution. This paradigm is not universal, however, and we presently lack a framework for understanding why certain biophysical parameters are important only in some cases. One possibility is that the relevance of these parameters is determined by evolutionarily conserved life-history-scale patterns of resource allocation and acquisition. We evaluated this hypothesis by investigating the correlates of competitive success in two territorial insects that exemplify markedly different lifetime patterns of resource utilization. We found that in the bot fly Cuterebra austeni, an extreme capital breeding species that depends entirely on energy acquired during its immature stages, territorial residency was most strongly correlated with a size-independent measure of energetic availability. In contrast, residency in the tarantula hawk wasp Hemipepsis ustulata was best predicted by variation in body size per se. Adult H. ustulata are able to supplement their larval-derived nutrient capital in the manner of an income breeder, and fuel reserves were independent of age and actually correlated negatively with residency in this species. These results underscore how the study of sexually selected phenomena may be enriched by an explicit consideration of life-history principles.