Breastfeeding Practices and Associated Factors among Immigrant Muslim Arab Women Living in a Metropolitan Area of the Southwest of United States.

Background: Muslim Arab immigrants are a fast-growing, under-studied, and underserved minority population in the United States. Little is known about breastfeeding practices in this population. objectives: The objective of this study was to describe infant feeding practices and factors associated with these practices among immigrant Muslim Arab women. design: A nonexperimental-one group, cross-sectional, descriptive, prospective design was used to identify infant feeding practices among immigrant Muslim Arab women. methods: A convenience sample of one hundred sixteen immigrant Muslim Arab women with at least one child five years or younger was recruited from a large metropolitan area in the Southwestern region. Participants completed the social ecological model of health promotion self-reported questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were performed to identify infant feeding practices and logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with these practices. results: Immigrant Muslim Arab mothers demonstrate high breastfeeding initiation rates (99.2%) and lengthy breastfeeding duration (M = 11.86, SD = 8.04), but low rates of exclusive breastfeeding at six months (21.6%). The most frequent reasons for early termination of breastfeeding were perceived insufficient milk (44.4%), child was still hungry after breastfeeding (37.5%), and the belief that the child was old enough to stop breastfeeding (32.9%). conclusion: Development of educational interventions are needed to improve breastfeeding exclusivity and raise women's awareness of the importance of exclusive breastfeeding. Healthcare providers should help women gain confidence in their ability to produce enough milk to successfully continue breastfeeding.

Feeling Safe and Nostalgia in Healthy Aging.

The population of older adults worldwide is growing, with an urgent need for approaches that develop and maintain intrinsic capacity consistent with healthy aging. Theory and empirical research converge on feeling safe as central to healthy aging. However, there has been limited attention to resources that cultivate feeling safe to support healthy aging. Nostalgia, "a sentimental longing for one's past," is established as a source of comfort in response to social threat, existential threat, and self-threat. Drawing from extant theory and research, we build on these findings to position nostalgia as a regulatory resource that cultivates feeling safe and contributes to intrinsic capacity to support healthy aging. Using a narrative review method, we: (a) characterize feeling safe as a distinct affective dimension, (b) summarize the character of nostalgia in alignment with feeling safe, (c) propose a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which nostalgia cultivates feeling safe, (d) highlight the contribution of nostalgia to feeling safe and emotional, physiological, and behavioral regulatory capabilities in healthy aging, and (e) offer conclusions and direction for research.

Dilthey's philosophy and methodology of hermeneutics: An approach and contribution to nursing science.

The purpose of this article was to examine the historical contribution of Wilhelm Dilthey's approach to the philosophy and methodology of hermeneutics in the demarcated context of nursing science. Dilthey's work made a fundamentally significant, yet ancillary, contribution to nursing science. Organically born from a need to deduce Biblical texts, hermeneutics later developed as a means to understand the truth of another's experience, in literal German language referred to as verstehen. A German-born empiricist and devout hermeneutic scholar, Dilthey extended the philosophy of hermeneutics to a methodological approach as a way to recapture expressed meaning of human experiences. His directive work paved a procedural pathway to probe the science of human nature while bound to the appropriate sociohistorical context. Hermeneutic methodology provides a phenomenological-like way to more keenly understand and interpret the whole person. This methodological approach steers a truth-seeking strategy fixed in meticulous and rigorous inquiry. Dilthey transparently recognized the humble fact that there is no true way to wholly grasp another's experience, an inherent limitation of our human abilities. The current paper posits that hermeneutical understanding verstehen can be paralleled to the concept of empathy in nursing. Understanding and empathy are foundational components to the field of nursing as a caring science. The complex yet invaluable philosophy and methodology of Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutics is notably relevant and applicable to nursing science as we strive to care for, treat, and heal patients as whole beings.

Development of a Nostalgic Remembering Intervention: Feeling Safe in Dyads Receiving Palliative Care for Advanced Heart Failure.

BACKGROUND: Dyads receiving palliative care for advanced heart failure are at risk for the loss of feeling safe, experienced as a fractured sense of coherence, discontinuity in sense of self and relationships, and strained social connections and altered roles. However, few theory-based interventions have addressed feeling safe in this vulnerable population. PURPOSE: The purpose of this article is to describe the development of the Nostalgic Remembering Intervention to strengthen feeling safe and promote adaptive physiological and psychological regulation in dyads receiving palliative care for heart failure. CONCLUSIONS: Systematic intervention development is essential to understand what, for whom, why, and how an intervention works in producing outcomes. Program theory provided a systematic approach to the development of the Nostalgic Remembering Intervention, including conceptualization of the problem targeted by the intervention, specification of critical inputs and conditions that operationalize the intervention, and understanding the mediating processes leading to expected outcomes. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Creating a foundation for cardiovascular nursing research and practice requires continued, systematic development of theory-based interventions to best meet the needs of dyads receiving palliative care for heart failure. The development of the Nostalgic Remembering Intervention to strengthen feeling safe in dyads provides a novel and relevant approach.

Storytelling as a Teaching Approach for Breastfeeding Education.

Providing education on breastfeeding to women and their families can be nuanced as a nurse navigates through identifying their questions, ideas, and knowledge gaps. Storytelling as a teaching method may offer a valuable means of communication between a nurse and the person for whom she is providing care. In this article, we reflect on the concept of storytelling for breastfeeding education via an author-generated approach. Three components are identified for the practice of teaching by storytelling: (a) asking for the person's story, (b) genuinely listening to the story, and (c) responding by storytelling. These three components can be operationalized through a seven-step process that includes welcoming, creating the opening, listening, considering, developing the story, telling the story, and being brave. Storytelling as a teaching modality may facilitate a learner's absorption of information.

Learning through collaboration: the NEXus consortium as a winning collaborative.

The Nursing Education Exchange (NEXus) is a consortium of academic doctoral programs in nursing, initiated in response to a national shortage of well-qualified nurse educators and the need to increase the number of doctoral faculty in nursing programs across the United States. The vision for the consortium was to use distance-accessible delivery methods to provide rural nurse educators and clinical nurses with access to quality doctoral programs in nursing while remaining in their home environments. In addition, smaller or newly established doctoral programs would be able to offer a wider variety of elective coursework without recruiting and hiring additional faculty, further decreasing their limited available resources. This article describes the initiation and implementation of a successful nursing education collaborative that has gained increasing influence across the country and is recognized by its acronym, NEXus.