Parent Involvement in End-of-Life Care and Decision Making in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit: An Integrative Review

Survival rates for very preterm and critically ill infants are increasing, raising complex ethical issues for health-care providers and parents who face the challenge of making end-of-life decisions for newborns. The purpose of this integrative literature review was to evaluate parental involvement in end-of-life care and decision making for their infant in the newborn intensive care unit. Findings revealed that establishing good relationships and clear communication between health-care providers and parents builds trust and eases stress placed on parents making decisions about the care of their infant. Palliative care programs provide support for parents and facilitate their decision making. Parents can be educated about how to communicate with health-care providers. Educating nurses on how to provide end-of-life care may also help improve support for parents during this difficult time. Additional research is recommended to examine parents' needs during and after end-of-life care decisions for their newborn.     

Perceptions of Moral Violations and Personality Traits Among Heroes and Villains

This study investigates disposition-formation processes in entertainment by predicting perceptions of media heroes and villains by their behavior in specific moral domains. Participants rated self-selected heroes and villains from television and film along the moral domains of care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity (Haidt & Joseph, 2007 Haidt, J. & Joseph, C. (2007). The moral mind: How 5 sets of innate moral intuitions guide the development of many culture-specific virtues, and perhaps even modules. In P. Carruthers S. Laurence & S. Stich (Eds.), The innate mind (Vol. 3, pp. 367–391). New York, NY: Oxford.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) as well as along dimensions of warmth, competence, and duplicity used in impression-formation research (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002 Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P. & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878–902. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.82.6.878[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Results show that heroes violate moral norms in domains of authority and purity, whereas villains violated moral norms in the domains of caring and group loyalty. Furthermore, these moral violations are associated with personality dimensions of warmth and competence differently for each character type, such that impressions of heroes are driven by their work in the care domain (i.e., saving or protecting people), whereas for villains, violation of purity norms is most strongly associated with subsequent impression formation processes.     

Predicting Media Appeal From Instinctive Moral Values

Zillmann's moral sanction theory defines morality subcultures for entertainment as groups of media viewers who evaluate character actions with shared value systems. However, the theory provides no a priori means to identify these shared value systems. The model of intuitive morality and exemplars incorporates a theoretical framework for identifying and testing the factors from which these shared value systems emerge. This study applies the model's framework, based on 5 “moral domains” from moral foundations theory, to test the influence of shared value systems on character perceptions and narrative appeal. A within-subject experiment varied violation of these five domains (care, fairness, ingroup loyalty, authority, and purity) and narrative resolutions (positive or negative outcomes) in 10 short narrative scenarios. The 5 domains predicted character perceptions and narrative appeal. The results are discussed in terms of the utility of these domains for understanding the reciprocal relationship between audience values and media response.     

Licensing Digital Content: A Practical Guide for Librarians. 2nd ed. Harris,Lesley Ellen

Abstract

Advances in technology create dramatic changes within libraries. The complex issues surrounding this new electronic, end-user environment have major ramifications and require expert knowledge. Electronic services librarians and electronic resources librarians are two specialized titles that have recently emerged within the field of librarian-ship to fill this niche. Job advertisements listed in American Libraries from January 1989 to December 1998 were examined to identify responsibilities, qualifications, organizational and salary information relating to the newly emerging role of electronic librarian.     

A group of nurses experience open learning—further explorations of the impact

The ideological moorings of distance education, both as a discipline and as a mode, rest on cognisance of multiple and varying contexts of learners, which it aims to address through responsive course content creation and delivery strategies. One of the frames through which the context needs to be understood is gender. There is research stating that gender both structures and influences the world of the learner and learner experience; therefore, learning needs to be contextualised to women’s personal, social, mental and emotional milieux. Through a qualitative inquiry, undertaken within the constructivist framework, aimed at uncovering the perspectives of learners and counsellors associated with five programmes of Indira Gandhi National Open University, the present paper attempts to revisit gender in open and distance learning (ODL). It seeks to uncover the impact of gender on learning through the distance mode; the need and availability of support structures in ODL to address the specific needs of women; the reflection and transaction of gender perspectives in content and pedagogy and, through this, to identify issues that may be relevant in the present‐day context. The findings of the study are not a function of gender alone. A matrix of variables appears to impact learner experience and response to ODL – the structuring of the programme and its requirements, the role(s) played by the counsellors, the motivations and the learning milieux created by the learners – all independently and collectively influence the learners’ – male and female – experience of ODL. While gender is not the independent variable each time, this does not mean that there are no gender‐specific issues any more – only that they need to be examined and answered in a particular context.