Diversifying the Workforce Through Focused Support of Nursing Students With Socioeconomic Challenges.

Background: Diversifying the nursing workforce entails concerted efforts to recruit and retain students from under-represented racial and socioeconomic groups who are especially vulnerable to barriers hindering academic success. This article describes faculty strategies for retaining and supporting students toward program completion and first-time National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEXRN) passage at a mission-driven school in rural Appalachia where most of the students have socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Method: Independent samples t tests were used to compare academic variables between students who passed the NCLEX-RN on their first attempt and students who did not.

Examining 'sticky' storytelling and moral claims as the essence of workplace bullying.

Background: Fisher (1985) argued that "there is no genre…that is not an episode in the story of life" (p. 347). As they incorporate moral claims, stories become 'sticky,' even when they are not accurate of fact, shifting listener beliefs, values, and sense of self.

Nurse Author: Who Me? Yes, You!

Background And Purpose: Potential nurse authors may find writing a challenge, including managing the publication process from getting started through submission to revision of the work and its acceptance. This special article presents strategies to help inexperienced writers develop and hone skills for journal publication.

Potential Publication Strategies: Tips discussed here that may lead to manuscript acceptance include selecting a topic of interest, using motivational self-talk approaches and structuring time to write, choosing coauthors, targeting a journal for submission, writing strong sentences in active voice, developing a structured abstract, using correct citation and reference formats, understanding reviews and resubmitting the manuscript, and keeping momentum to produce continued writing results.

The incongruity of workplace bullying victimization and inclusive excellence.

Purpose: Bullying occurs frequently-and with significant negative outcomes-in workplace settings. Once established, bullying endures in the workplace, requiring the interaction of a bully perpetrator and an intended target who takes on the role of victim. Not every target becomes a victim, however.

Unacknowledged threats proffered "in a manner of speaking": recognizing workplace bullying as shaming.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine workplace bullying victims' perceptions of what they heard their bully counterparts say through their use of prosody.

Design: From a sampling frame of 89 manuscripts referenced in the authors' previous studies, we identified a subset (n = 10) that included quotes regarding bullying victims' perceptions of communication experiences with their bully perpetrators.

Methods: We used hermeneutics and a recursive metasynthesis to interpret quotes embedded in the manuscripts chosen for this study.

Status limbo: analysis of nurse faculty member reports of administrator response to workplace bullying complaints.

Increasing concern about bullying among adults in workplaces is notable internationally. Unlike blatant physical bullying, workplace bullying often involves bullies' dismissive, demeaning, and typically surreptitious, one-on-one communications with their intended victims. These communications challenge recognition when they are examined beyond the interpersonal margins of the bully-victim dyad.

An overview of the DSM-5: changes, controversy, and implications for psychiatric nursing.

Scheduled for publication in May 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5), will guide clinical diagnoses, treatment plans, medication choices and protocols, insurance reimbursements, and research agendas throughout the United States. It will also serve as a reference manual for clinicians around the world. This primary diagnostic source used by psychiatric and mental health providers is undergoing significant change in organization and content relative to the previous edition.

Speaking of workplace bullying.

Despite the increasing frequency of its reported incidence, especially in health care practice and education settings, workplace bullying seems to defy victims' clear understanding of its effects on them personally and to challenge their ability to provide cogent explanations about those effects to others. Especially, when it is subtle, as is the case in much of workplace bullying, the experience is emotionally confusing to its victims, and its inherent behaviors often seem absurd to those who have not lived through them firsthand. Moreover, the outwardly innocuous behaviors of subtle workplace bullying can yield long-term disorder for victims' coworkers and for employing organizations.

Psychological type and explanatory style of nursing students and clinical faculty.

Health care providers' collaboration and effective teamwork are essential to patient safety and quality care. Part of an ongoing project, this study focused on nursing faculty-student communication characteristics, specifically examining psychological type (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) and explanatory style (Attributional Style Questionnaire) of participating first-year baccalaureate nursing students (n = 286) and clinical nursing faculty (n = 59) from both 2-year and 4-year nursing programs. Modal student psychological type was ESFJ, and modal faculty psychological type was ISTJ.

Strategies for successful management and oversight of nurse faculty workforce initiatives: lessons from the field.

A looming shortage of nursing faculty is a major contributor to the growing national and international nursing workforce shortage. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2006, October) highlighted strategies in use nationally to address the shortage of nursing faculty in a recently posted Web site. Summarized on that site are responses from state-level nursing program administrators to a questionnaire generated by the AACN Government Affairs Committee.

First-year nursing students' accounts of reasons for student depression.

This study used content analysis and hermeneutics to examine 53 first-year nursing students' surmised reasons for their own or their peers' experiences of feeling down or depressed. Study data were confidential e-mail responses (n = 53) to the question, "If you or another student you know has been feeling down or depressed, can you describe a reason?" Content analysis reflected respondents' sense of their own relatedness to the experience; a general sense of awareness of the occurrence of feeling down or depressed among students; suggested reasons, from general to specific, for those experiences among students; and sense of ownership, from self to others to individuals unspecified, as they described the experience of feeling down or depressed among first-year college students. Hermeneutic analysis revealed seven themes characterizing student experiences of feeling down or depressed.

Toward a qualified yes: personal characteristics of postbaccalaureate nursing students and implementation of the clinical nurse leader role.

Anecdotal and research data suggest that psychological type and explanatory style influence individuals' day-to-day functioning. The assessment of these characteristics among postbaccalaureate students will support faculty in planning for students' educational programs and guide them as they provide support for the expansive role functions of, among others, the graduates of the newly proposed clinical nurse leader program. This article is a report of one study included in a longitudinal project examining the influence of psychological type and explanatory style on students' academic success.

Poststructuralist musings on the mind/body question in health care.

Consideration of mind/body phenomena in health care has been grounded in the constraints of overt and covert paradigmatic assumptions and the mechanisms of power/knowledge that poststructuralists pose as characteristic of empiricism. This article examines the development and conceptualization of mind/body phenomena within the context of evidence considered fitting in health care, that is, within the disciplinary matrix of empiricism. Discussion focuses particularly on inference, probability, and cause and effect, significant components of empiricism, as they have influenced the direction of the mind/body debate in health care during the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Relationship as an inherent component in healthy women's fatigue.

The notion of fatigue has remained ambiguous despite more than 100 years of study. Fatigue is recognized as subjective in nature, and it is studied and clinically managed as primarily intrapersonal in scope, with treatment approaches often based in an established, if unfounded, hierarchy of assumptions. When a physiologic cause for fatigue is not identifiable, fatigue complaints often are considered illegitimate.

Acknowledging unexplained fatigue of tired women.

Purpose: To investigate indicators of fatigue, including depression, sense of powerlessness, and body aches, and to examine differences between symptomatic and asymptomatic women.

Design: Descriptive, comparative analysis.

Methods: Investigators evaluated fatigue, depression, sense of powerlessness, and body aches for two groups of women in a small, rural community.