Western Journal of Nursing Research

A phenomenological study was conducted with 20 spinal cord injured persons and their family members to examine the meaning of living with spinal cord injury 5 to 10 years after the initial injury. Seven themes emerged from the data. The themes are looking for understanding to a life that is unknown, stumbling along an unlit path, viewing self through a stained glass window, challenging the bonds of love, being chained to the injury, moving forward in a new way of life, and reaching normalcy. The uncovered meanings enhance our understanding and appreciation that living with spinal cord injury is a continuous learning experience. The study findings may be useful in the development of self-care strategies and ongoing interventions that focus on maintaining physical and psychological health for both spinal cord injured persons and their family members throughout the course of living with the disability.

This study describes how Minimum Data Set (MDS) coordinators' relationship patterns influence nursing home care processes. MDS coordinators interact with nursing home staff to coordinate resident assessment and care planning, but little is known about how they enact this role or influence particular care processes beyond paper compliance. Guided by complexity science and using two nursing home case studies, the authors describe MDS coordinators' relationship patterns by assessing the extent to which they used and fostered good connections, newinformation flow, and cognitive diversity. MDScoordinators at one site fostered new information flow, good connections, and cognitive diversity, which positively influenced assessment and care planning, whereas those at the other site did little to foster these three relationship parameters, with little influence on care processes. This study revealed that MDS coordinators are an important new source of capacity for the nursing home industry to improve quality of care.

The often-cited back translation procedure used for the translation of research instruments has not been consistently described in cross-cultural literature. Translation errors resulting in conceptually dissimilar instruments can compromise comparisons of cross-cultural health initiatives. This report describes a five-step translation procedure and equivalence and reliability testing process used to develop the High School Questionnaire: Profile of Experiences (HSQ) in Mandarin. Each step of the translation process provided additional information and detected discrepancies between the English and Mandarin versions of the HSQ. Issues related to grammatical translation, cultural usage and experience, syntax, and concept interpretation were exposed by the translation process. The procedures used in this 18-month study were rigorous enough to create an instrument that was both linguistically appropriate and culturally relevant.

The past 20 years have seen an overall decline in survey response rates and an even more pronounced decline in samples of health care professionals. The authors tested the use of a “thank you” or “reminder” postcard as a method by which to stem the tide of declining response rates. The authors conducted a mail and telephone survey of 49,605 registered nurses for the 2000 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses and sent an extra mailing to a random subsample (n= 4,968). They then compared response rates for both groups. Contrary to prior research, this study found that reminder postcards did not improve response rates or rates of return. There may be several reasons for this finding, including the general familiarity with, and high saliency of, this research project for the nursing community. These results suggest that even widely accepted best practices for survey methods deserve scrutiny when applied to special subpopulations.

This three-phase study describes the development and psychometric properties of the Medication-Taking Questionnaire (MTQ) to measure the purposeful action domain (reasons individuals decide to accept medication treatment) in the medication adherence model for hypertension. During Phase I, items were evaluated for content validity and clarity. Item analysis, internal consistency, and exploratory factor analysis were preformed during Phase II to finalize the MTQ: Purposeful Action as 12 items and 2 subscales (treatment benefits and medication safety). Phase III evaluated the MTQ: Purposeful Action for temporal stability and construct validity. The final version MTQ: Purposeful Action demonstrated good internal consistency, temporal stability, and construct validity. The MTQ: Purposeful Action appears to have good psychometric characteristics that represent the decision-making process for adherence in medication treatment for hypertension.