Home care concerns for the normal newborn

Four of the most common problems encountered with newborns in the home include feeding difficulties, jaundice, gastrointestinal problems, and inconsolable crying. This article suggests assessment measures and intervention strategies to deal with these problems and evaluate the home environment for safety. This article also includes suggestions to promote safe infant feeding, bathing, sleeping arrangements, car safety seats, firearm and poison storage, fall prevention, concerns about pets, pest control, heating and cooling, and a nonsmoking environment.     

Learner concerns and teaching strategies for video-conferencing

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to understand the influences of interactive video-conferencing technology on learning experiences of RN students studying for baccalaureate degrees via interactive distance education. METHOD: Data collection in this phenomenological study used open-ended questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups. Preliminary thematic analysis of questionnaires shaped open-ended questions for interviews and focus groups with learners confirmed findings. RESULTS: Students identified themes of connecting with others, organization, negative influences, and personal factors as influential to their learning. They also identified useful teaching strategies to facilitate learning within this distance nursing education environment. CONCLUSION: University nursing programs using video-conferencing for distance education can foster learning by using teaching strategies that fit the technology, increase student interaction, and engage the students.     

Depression and affective meaning for current concerns

Recent inquiries into the etiology and maintenance of depression have had a strong cognitive emphasis. However, relatively less attention has been paid to the connotative significance of depressive experience. In particular, there is much to be learned about the depressed person's emotional response to the incentives in his life. In the present study, moderately to severely depressed and nondepressed college students were asked to provide a list of “current concerns,” which they subsequently ranked in terms of order of importance. Each subject's five most important concerns served as target stimuli for a semantic differential analysis. The results indicated that, relative to nondepressed students, depressed subjects viewed their concerns in a less positive and less active light. The groups did not differ in their ratings of the potency of their concerns, with both groups tending to perceive their concerns as highly potent. A second purpose of the study was to examine whether the groups differed in the number or type of current concerns. Depressed students reported a greater number of concerns. In comparing the groups with respect to the number of concerns mentioned within each of 16 categories, it was found that depressed subjects reported more concerns than nondepressed subjects in the areas of love and sex, employment and money, and mental health.