T. Neal Garland

Caregiving in Nursing Homes Views of Licensed Nurses and Nursing Assistants

This investigation is a qualitative study of the views held by 36 licensed nurses (25 registered nurses and 11 licensed practical nurses) and 40 nursing assistants regarding caregiving in nursing homes. Because these care providers are most directly involved in the delivery of care, their views are important as determinants of quality of care. Study findings focus on the extent to which nurses and nursing assistants agree on what contributes to good care and how they perceive the work that each does. Also reported are their perceptions regarding factors that make care delivery easy or difficult. Results suggest that nurses and nursing assistants share selected perceptions about the division of labor in the nursing home. Also evident are areas of less agreement among these members of different status sets. A discussion of how these caregivers can work together as effective team members is presented.

Scales for Investigation of the Dual-Career Family.

Research on the dual-career family has primarily been qualitative and has used relatively small samples. Although much has been learned, questions about the representativeness and generalizability of findings remain. This study uses data collected from 53 career wives and has three purposes: to suggest six analytical areas for dualcareer research (marriage type, domestic responsibility, satisfaction, self-image, career salience, and career line); to provide questions that may be utilized in a largescale survey research project; and to quantitatively analyze scale types by using reliability and Guttman procedures. The scales are supported and provide useful direction for future dual-career family research.

An Investigation of the Impact of Social Support on the Outcome of an Alcoholism Treatment Program

This study examines the role of social support in recovery from the chronic illness of alcoholism. Symbolic interactionism provides the theoretical framework from which two hypotheses are derived--one of which deals with the amount of social support available to patients during treatment and one of which deals with the social support actually experienced during treatment. Self-administered questionnaires were given to 83 patients enrolled in an inpatient treatment program in a midwestern city in the United States. Although patients did show a significant improvement in self-concept during the course of the treatment, neither of the hypotheses was supported by the data. Conceptual and measurement problems associated with the utilization of social support as a variable are discussed.

An Approach to Quantifying the Needs of Dual-Career Families

Research on the dual-career family is identifying strains and costs particular to women who are attempting to balance the two roles of career and family. Counseling and associated research have not, as yet, provided knowledge that would lead to the more effective counseling of women in dual career families. Using wives in the second phase of a longitudinal study of 53 dual career couples, this study inductively derives a set of dual-career scales useful for counseling: family and career interface, personal satisfaction with trend setting, career support of the traditional wife-mother role, trend breaking, trend maintenance, and compensatory factors. All met stringent reliability analyses and S form Guttman scales that allow for the internal ordering of subareas from least difficult to most difficult. These subareas in the Guttman scales provide a quantitative base for identifying in detail areas to counsel and which areas must be counseled first before other diagnosed problem areas can be coped with.

Evaluating an Antismoking Program Diagnostics of Underlying Causal Mechanisms

This study reports the results of an evaluation of an antismoking message aimed at seventhand tenth-grade students. The message was delivered in the form of a comic book developed specifically for this program. In order to avoid the pitfalls of the traditional black-box evaluation, this study examines both the relative effectiveness of various treatment modalities and the intervening processes of the program. Findings showed that none of the treatment modalities had any significant effect on teenagers smoking attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. However, analysis of the effects of the different modalities did show that the more intensive the treatment modality, the more times students read the comic and the more they learned about the story and the characters in the conhic. The information on diagnosing the causal mechanism underlying the program leads to several useful suggestions for future program improvements.

Correlates of men's attitudes toward women's roles in Libya☆

Attitudes toward women s roles often are regarded as measures of modernization in developing nations. This study examines factors influencing mens attitudes toward womens roles, in Libya. Interviews were conducted during the summer of1979 with a sample of200 males in the city of Tripoli. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were done to investigate sex-role attitudes toward division of labor in the home, decision making, labor force participation, and political participation. Age, education, and family of orientation (nuclear or extended) were consistently important in both types of analysis. Social status, while unimportant in bivariate relationships, became significant in the multivariate framework. Whether or not the respondents mother works was important in the bivariate matrix but contributed nothing

The Validity of Student Evaluations of Objective Test Items

This study has used the correlation between student ratings of multiple-choice items and the point biserial correlation between the item responses and the total test score as a measure of the validity of student ratings of objective test items. Results show students are unable to distinguish discriminating multiple-choice items from non-discriminating items. However, students with knowledge of the subject area were able to distinguish discriminating items at a statistically significant level.

On the Social Construction of Reality: Reported Husband-Wife Differences

Introduction The reciprocal nature of the role of husband and wife in the con struction of reality is an assumption made in nearly all theoretical discussions. As Berger and Kellner (1970:58) have observed in their description of the construction of reality in marriage, Each partners definitions of reality must be continually correlated with the definitions of the other. The other is present in nearly all horizons of everyday conduct ... In each partners psychological economy of significant others, the marriage partner becomes the other par excellence, the nearest and most decisive coinhabitant of the world. Indeed all other significant relationships have to be almost automatically reperceived and regrouped in accordance with this drastic shift.

Caring for Elderly Parents: Juggling Work, Family, and Caregiving in Middle and Working Class Families

Introduction Illustrations of Caregiving Becoming the Caregiver for a Disabled Parent: Processes and Pathways Siblings and the Division of Labor: Conflict and Cooperation The Race from Home to the Office: Managing Work and Caregiving Stress and Implications for Family Life Daughters-in-Law as Caregivers The Caregiving Career Just Plain Folk: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender Policy Implications Conclusions Appendix: Methodology Table Bibliography