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PubMed2000

The concept of social care and the analysis of contemporary welfare states.

Care is now a widely-used concept in welfare state research, firmly established in the literature by feminist analysis. We believe that the concept as it has been used and developed to date has limitations that have hampered its development as a general category of welfare state analysis. In essence we argue that the political economy aspects of the concept have remained underdeveloped. The main purpose of this article is to elaborate a care-centered concept--which we name social care--that countenances and develops care as an activity and set of relations lying at the intersection of state, market and family (and voluntary sector) relations. We are especially concerned to examine what the concept of social care can tell us about welfare state variation and welfare state change and development. The article works systematically through these themes, beginning with a brief historical sketch of the concept of care and then moving on to elaborate the analytic potential of the concept of social care. In the latter regard we make the case that it can lead to a more encompassing analysis, helping to overcome especially the fragmentation in existing scholarship between the cash and service dimensions of the welfare state and the relative neglect of the latter. The concept of social care serves to shift the centre of analysis from specific policy domains so that instead of focusing on cash benefits or services in isolation it becomes possible to consider them as part of a broader set of inter-relating elements. In this and other regards, the concept has the potential to say something new about welfare states.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

"Where do we teach what?" Finding broad concepts in the medical school curriculum.

BACKGROUND: Often, medical educators and students do not know where important concepts are taught and learned in medical school. Manual efforts to identify and track concepts covered across the curriculum are inaccurate and resource intensive. OBJECTIVE: To test the ability of a web-based application called KnowledgeMap (KM) to automatically locate where broad biomedical concepts are covered in lecture documents in the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. METHODS: In 2003, the authors derived a gold standard set of curriculum documents by ranking 383 lecture documents as high, medium, or low relevance in their coverage of 4 broad biomedical concepts: genetics, women's health, dermatology, and radiology. We compared the gold standard rankings to KM, an automated tool that generates a variable number of subconcepts for each broad concept to calculate a relevance score for each document. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area-under-the-curve were derived for each ranking using varying relevance score cutoffs. RESULTS: Receiver operating characteristic curve areas were acceptably high for each broad concept (range 0.74 to 0.98). At relevance scores that optimized sensitivity and specificity, 78% to 100% of highly relevant documents were identified. The best results were obtained with the application of 63 to 1437 subconcepts for a given broad concept. The search time was fast. CONCLUSIONS: The KM tool capably and automatically locates the detailed coverage of broad concepts across medical school documents in real time. Use of KM or similar tools may prove useful for other medical schools to identify broad concepts in their curricula.

Curriculum↗
PubMed1999

Clarification and integration of similar quality of life concepts.

PURPOSE: To identify major problems that obscure understanding of quality of life; to differentiate quality of life from other closely related concepts, and to offer a definition of quality of life. Quality of life is a term frequently used, but seldom defined, in nursing research. Multiple interpretations and measures make evaluating research difficult. The need to clarify concepts, develop nursing theory, and enhance communication is significant. Concept clarification is also essential for research instrument development and evaluation. ORGANIZING CONSTRUCT AND SCOPE: Concept analysis as proposed by Walker and Avant. Preconceived theories were avoided to keep the analysis as unbiased as possible. The analyst considered many descriptions of quality of life, but eventually included only those in the scientific literature. SOURCES: CINAHL, Medline, Psych-Info, ERIC, Social Science Abstracts, and reference lists from published articles in nursing, medicine, psychology, and sociology were used. Twenty-seven theory-based articles and book chapters published since 1989 and a convenience sample of 88 research articles published in 1997 were used. This sample was selected from 16,480 articles published 1993 to 1998. METHODS: Concept clarification comparisons to identify the major attributes of several closely related concepts, including well-being, satisfaction with life, and functional status. Major attributes were validated by a panel of cohorts who met weekly for five consecutive weeks for the purpose of analyzing various concepts. FINDINGS: Quality of life is comprised of subjective indicators such as well-being and satisfaction with life and objective indicators, such as functional status. Continued dialog and research is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of health and quality of life. CONCLUSIONS: A model showing the relationships among quality of life, well-being, functional status, and satisfaction with life is provided and a definition of quality of life is offered. Researchers and authors should include the definition of quality of life used in their work. Instruments should reflect the theoretic definition used. Care should be taken to clarify if functional status, well-being, satisfaction with life are the concepts under consideration as reflecting a part of overall quality of life.

Humans↗
PubMed2000

Quantitative concept mapping in pulmonary physiology: comparison of student and faculty knowledge structures.

Quantitative concept mapping, in contrast with qualitative approaches, is rigorous scientifically and permits statistical analyses of data about concept learning. This study extends past quantitative research on the structure of student concept learning in pulmonary physiology. Pathfinder scaling is used to derive concept maps for medical and veterinary students and their physiology instructors at Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin, respectively. The concept maps are evaluated for coherence (internal consistency), student-instructor similarity, and correlation of similarity with final examination scores. Results show that student and instructor concept maps are coherent and that student concept maps become increasingly similar to instructors' concept maps from pre- to postinstruction, but that student-instructor concept map similarity does not correlate with examination performance. Research outcomes are discussed concerning possible sources of variation in student and faculty knowledge structures.

Data Collection↗
PubMed1994

Evaluation of optimal age at first conception in gilts from data collected in commercial swine herds.

The purpose of this study was to find the economically optimal period of first conception in gilts, addressing the issues of lifetime reproductive performance and expected herd life. A profit equation was used to combine the effects into one economic parameter. The data were from 14,910 gilts on 54 farms throughout The Netherlands. The average number of pigs born alive in the first litter increased with older age at conception. In the second litter a similar, but much smaller, effect was observed. Age at first conception had no effect on number of pigs born alive in the third or greater litter. Gilts bred at an older age had a shorter expected herd life than gilts bred at a younger age. Evaluating the reasons for culling revealed that infertility became a more important reason with increasing age at first conception. The proportion culled for infertility increased linearly from 18% at conception on d 200 to 24.5% at conception on d 300. Combining the effect of litter size and herd life led to the conclusion that the profit per gilt (sow) was not significantly affected by her age at first conception. It is concluded that the optimal economic age at first conception was considered to be approximately 200 to 220 d of age when the cost of housing and feed of the gilt from entry to first conception were taken into account.

Aging↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The concept of integration: a foundation for evaluating outcomes of nursing care.

Changes in the health care environment, an aging population, and an increase in chronic health conditions require consideration of the adequacy of concepts available for demonstrating the effectiveness of nursing care. One concept that has potential utility for nursing in this regard is the concept of integration. Analysis of the concept of integration was conducted to alleviate existing ambiguity and to explore ways in which this concept has been employed in diverse disciplines. The concept of integration is characterized primarily as a process of combination: two or more elements are merged with sufficient interaction so that unity of the newly formed entity is achieved. The attributes of the concept of integration, therefore, include process, combination, interaction, and unity. The concept of integration is useful in evaluation of reconciliation of past and present identities and altered role relationships within the environment.

Concept Formation↗
PubMed2004

Self-concept in adult survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia: a cooperative Children's Cancer Group and National Institutes of Health study.

BACKGROUND: Self-concept was compared between adult survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and sibling controls. Adult survivor subgroups at greatest risk for negative self-concept were identified. PROCEDURE: Survivors (n = 578) aged > or =18 years, treated before age 20 years on Children's Cancer Group (CCG) ALL protocols, and 396 sibling controls completed a telephone interview and the Harter Adult Self-Perception Profile (ASPP). RESULTS: Survivors global self-worth scores were significantly lower than sibling controls (mean 3.09 vs. 3.18; P = 0.022). Unemployed survivors reported lower global self-worth scores than employed (mean 2.77 vs. 3.12; P = 0.0001), whereas employment status was not associated with self-worth in controls. Among survivors, predictors of negative self-concept included unemployment (odds ratio (OR) = 2.87; 95% CI: 1.50-5.50), and believing that cancer treatment limited employability (OR = 3.17; 95% CI: 1.79-5.62). Unemployment increased the odds for negative self-concept among survivors who received combinations of central nervous system (CNS) irradiation (CRT) and intrathecal methotrexate (IT-MTX), except high CRT with no or low dose IT-MTX. Employed survivors who perceived that treatment limited their employability showed increased odds of negative self-concept for all treatment groups compared to those who did not. Minority ethnic group membership was a borderline significant predictor of negative self-concept (OR = 1.79; 95% CI: 0.94-3.33). CONCLUSIONS: Global self-worth was significantly lower in ALL survivors than sibling controls, however, 81% of survivors had positive self-concept. Survivor subgroups most vulnerable to negative self-concept were the unemployed survivors, believing that cancer treatment affected employability, and ethnic minority group members. Targeted intervention may have greater clinical relevance for these subgroups.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1985

Creativity in biology and in the human mind (manifestation of concepts).

The article is based on the widely held notion that creativity is a phenomenon studied in two branches of the science of life: psychology (in a wide sense) on one side, and evolutionary biology on the other. Therefore, an analysis of creativity of the mind should contribute to the solution of problems in biological evolution, problems which cannot be fully explained by the orthodox assumption of small steps of mutation and selection. This analysis is restricted to three classes of creativity, which are: a) organismal creativity, as exemplified by the creation of organs such as "eye" and "heart". b) mental-scientific creativity, exemplified by Newton's notion of "gravity" between planets and stars. c) mental-technological creativity, exemplified by Gutenberg's invention of "printing by movable types". The analysis of these classes is based on concepts, which are interrelated structurally by means of propositions. Two types of propositions are distinguished: factual ones named "cognita", and hypothetical ones named "hypothetical episodes". A further basis of the analysis is the assumption that creativity consists of several phases, of which incubation and insight are the essential ones. In carrying out the analysis, the writer shows that incubation functions on two or three lines of thought, one of which can be expressed by factual cognita, and the other ones predominantly by hypothetical episodes. Those several lines are integrated by means of logical implication, by which insight into a novel concept is obtained. In a second method of analysis, the several lines of incubation are represented by networks. In this method, the novel concept is obtained by integrating the individual networks into a common structure. It is proved that the methods of analysis described above can be applied to all three classes of creativity definined previously. Drawing conclusions from the analysis, the writer points out that the organismal concepts were manifested in biological evolution many millions of years prior to the appearance of man and his brain on earth. The writer, therefore, argues that a great number of concepts are not a creation of man's mind, but are entities which pre-existed man and were manifested to him. Such concepts may be conceived as forming a time-independent "conceptual universe" external to the "material universe" of galaxies, stars and organisms. Thus, for example, the concept of an "eye" was manifested in biological evolution as the organ "eye" of many organisms. Much later, this concept was manifested to man, when he invented the optical camera.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Animals↗
PubMed2006

General self-concept and life satisfaction for boys with differing levels of physical coordination: the role of goal orientations and leisure participation.

Participation in leisure-time activities, self-concept perceptions and individual dispositional goal orientations were examined as mediators of relationships between physical coordination and self-evaluations of life satisfaction and general self-concept for 173 boys aged 10-13 years. Participants completed seven-day activity diaries and 12-month retrospective recall questionnaires recording participation in leisure-time activities. Self-report measures of self-concept, global life satisfaction and dispositional goal orientations were also completed. Results showed that boys with moderate to severe physical coordination difficulties had significantly lower self-concept perceptions of physical ability and appearance, peer and parent relations and general self-concept, as well as lower life satisfaction than boys with medium to high levels of physical coordination. The relationships between boys' physical coordination and their self-perceptions of life satisfaction and general self-concept were significantly influenced by individual self-concept appraisals of physical ability and appearance, peer and parent relations. Adopting task-oriented goals was found to positively change the relationship between physical coordination and both general self-concept and life satisfaction. Team sport participation positively mediated the relationship between physical coordination and life satisfaction. The potential for team sport participation and adoption of task-oriented goals to influence life satisfaction for boys with differing levels of physical coordination was discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Student learning with concept mapping of care plans in community-based education.

Concept mapping, a learning strategy used to understand key concepts and relationships between concepts, has been suggested as a method to plan and evaluate nursing care. The purpose of this study was to empirically test the effectiveness of concept mapping for student learning and the students' satisfaction with the strategy. A quasi-experimental pre- and posttest design was used to examine the content of concept maps of care plans constructed by junior-level baccalaureate students (n = 23) at the beginning and end of a community-based mental health course. Additionally, students completed a questionnaire to self-evaluate their learning and report their satisfaction with concept mapping. Findings indicated that concept mapping significantly improved students' abilities to see patterns and relationships to plan and evaluate nursing care, and most students (21/23) expressed satisfaction in using the strategy. This study supported concept mapping as an additional learning strategy and has extended knowledge in community-based nursing education.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed1994

Acquisition of new concepts by two amnesic patients.

Two Korsakoff amnesics (A.G. and G.S.) and two control subjects were taught six new concepts. Each concept was composed of three parts: the name of the concept, the context in which the concept originated and its definition. The learning procedure consisted of two phases: (1) learning the concept names and definitions by means of the vanishing-cues method; (2) practice on examples of the concepts through a classification task: examples were either set in the same context as that given in the original definition or in mixed contexts (same and new contexts). Subjects were then tested after 24 hours, a week and a month on their ability to identify new examples as belonging to one of the conceptual rules studied (transfer tests). Both patients showed substantial learning. Patient A.G. was slow and dependent of the first letter cues in the vanishing-cues learning phase but nevertheless, she acquired a large and flexible conceptual knowledge and this was especially true for concepts that were practised by means of mixed-context examples. Patient G.S. easily learned to associate the definitions with the concept names but her conceptual knowledge remained more limited. These results confirm the existence of a semantic learning ability in amnesic patients. They also suggest that under appropriate learning conditions, amnesics may eventually acquire a new flexible conceptual knowledge.

Alcohol Amnestic Disorder↗
PubMed2004

Concept mapping in pulmonary physiology using pathfinder scaling.

This three-part article begins with a brief presentation of a framework that describes different approaches to conduct and report research on expert knowledge. The framework contrasts direct vs. indirect approaches and provides examples of each. Second, the article gives a detailed description of the methods and results of three concept mapping studies in pulmonary physiology that employ Pathfinder scaling, an indirect approach. The studies derive concepts maps for a variety of faculty experts individually and in groups. Two of the studies focus on changes in students' concept maps of the pulmonary physiology concepts as a result of instruction. Changes are gauged in terms of the degree to which students' concept maps approximate instructors' concept maps due to educational interventions. An index of student-instructor concept map similarity is also correlated with student performance on final examinations. The article concludes by articulating several "next steps" in the Feinberg Northwestern and Wisconsin program of health sciences education research on concept mapping using Pathfinder scaling.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Set/reset: use and disuse of concepts in impression formation.

In three experiments, impressions of an ambiguously described stimulus person were assimilated toward the implications of primed concepts when performance of the priming task was interrupted, but were contrasted with these implications when performance of the priming task was allowed to continue to completion. In addition, when the primed concepts were evaluatively consistent (Experiment 1), assimilation and contrast were observed on both prime-related and prime-unrelated dimensions. When the primed concepts were evaluatively inconsistent (Experiment 2), however, these shifts in impression were observed only on dimensions directly related to the primed concepts. When no concepts descriptively relevant to the stimulus information were primed (Experiment 3), the assimilation and contrast were relative to the favorableness of a primed general evaluative person concept. Taken together, these results suggest that a concept may be accessible to an individual and may be relevant to target information, yet not be used to encode that information; that assimilation and contrast may occur for reasons other than the discrepancy between the target and the contextual stimuli on the dimension of judgment; and that individuals may use the evaluative implications of their person representation as a cue in deciding which of several equally applicable, equally accessible descriptive concepts to use in interpreting information about a person.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

The effects of experimentally induced changes in self-concept on associative learning.

It has been hypothesized that self-concept influences ability to learn. This experiment systematically manipulated the self-concepts of learners regarding their abilities to learn a foreign language and measured their subsequent learning of a synthetic foreign language vocabulary list. Eleven Ss were randomly assigned to each of three groups: self-concept raised, self-concept lowered, control. Ss were college freshman who were not enrolled in a foreign language course or had not previously taken more than one semester of a foreign language. Self-concepts were measured as self-description of ability to learn a foreign language. Self-concepts were raised or lowered by providing false scores on a foreign language aptitude test. Learning was measured as performance on a paired-associates task utilizing random shapes and CVCs. Ss with lowered self-concepts learned more slowly than control Ss or Ss with raised self-concepts.

Achievement↗
PubMed1977

Academic achievement as a function of specific and global measures of self-concept.

This study examined the correlations between academic achievement and factor specific, as well as global, measures of self-concept for 314 fourth and sixth grade boys and girls divided into grade level groups with and without Spanish surnames. The Primary Self-Concept Inventory was used to measure self-concept on six scales: physical size, emotional state, peer acceptance, helpfulness, success, and student-self. A global self-concept score was derived by totaling the scores on the six scales. Achievement was measured as total score on the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills. The two specific measures of self-concept that were most reflective of school performance, success and student-self, tended to show low positive correlations with achievement. The remaining specific measures, as well as the global measure, tended to show no relationship to achievement. These results suggest that an area specific model of self-concept is more useful than a global or undifferentiated model. Further, the low correlations between school related self-concept and achievement suggest that, as a group, students frequently have rather inaccurate academic self-concepts.

Achievement↗
PubMed1998

Comparing the self-concepts of persons with and without physical disabilities.

Tam and Watkins (1995b) explored the basis of self-concepts of physically disabled and nondisabled Hong Kong Chinese adults and developed the hierarchical multidimensional self-concept models. Two questionnaires that measure self-concept were developed and validated for those groups. The questionnaires share 41 common items in 6 self-concept areas. In the present study, the 2 groups' responses were compared via univariate analysis of variance. The nondisabled participants (n = 200) were found to have statistically significantly higher means than their disabled counterparts (n = 214) in total self-concept, material self-concepts, and physical self-concepts. There were no significant differences in their family, social, and work self-concepts. The nondisabled participants reported greater openness (indicated by higher self-criticism scores).

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Attitudes to concept maps as a teaching/learning activity in undergraduate health professional education: influence of preferred learning style.

Concept maps that integrate and relate concepts in a nonlinear fashion are widely accepted as an educational tool that can underpin meaningful learning in medical education. However, student take-up may be affected by a number of cognitive and non-cognitive influences. In the present study, student attitudes to pre-prepared concept maps introduced in Stage 2 conjoint MPharm and BSc Pharmacology lectures were examined in relation to preferred learning styles according to the Felder-Silverman model. There was no statistically significant influence of dichotomous learning style dimension (sensing/intuitive; visual/verbal; active/reflector; sequential/global) on the self-reported utility of such concept maps to learning. However, when strength of preference was analysed within each dimension, moderate/strong verbal learners were found to be significantly less likely to self-report concept maps as useful relative to mild verbal learners. With this important exception, these data now suggest that student attitudes to concept maps are broadly not influenced by preferred learning styles and furthermore highlight the potential of concept maps to address a variety of different learning styles and thereby facilitate 'teaching to all types'. Concept maps could therefore potentially assist motivation, engagement and deep learning in medical and biomedical science education when used as a supplement to more traditional teaching/learning activities.

Concept Formation↗
PubMed2006

Attitudes to concept maps as a teaching/learning activity in undergraduate health professional education: influence of preferred approach to learning.

Pre-prepared concept maps that organise knowledge in a non-linear fashion appeal to a variety of cognitive learning styles and may thus represent an educational tool that supports 'teaching to all types'. However, another central cognitive factor, learning approach, may have a bearing on student take-up of this learning resource. Student attitudes to pre-prepared concept maps introduced in Stage 2 MPharm and BSc Pharmacology lectures were therefore examined in relation to the principal learning orientations according to Duff's 30-item revised approaches to study inventory (RASI). Approximately one half of students (49.6 +/- 4.5%) reported pre-prepared concept maps to be useful to their learning (n = 121). When preferred learning approach was examined, derived from the highest RASI score per individual and excluding ties, 31.9 +/- 4.3%, 29.3 +/- 4.2% and 38.8 +/- 4.5% of students demonstrated a preference for the deep approach (DA), strategic approach (STA) and surface approach (SUA), respectively (P > 0.05, chi2 goodness-of-fit test, n = 116). There was a weak but statistically significant association between preferred learning approach identified by Duff's 30-item RASI and the self-reported usefulness of concept maps (P < 0.05, chi2 test of independence; Cramer's V = 0.235; lambda = 0.193). In contrast, gender was not significantly associated with attitude to concept maps in this student cohort. A preliminary analysis of standardised residuals based on observed and expected frequencies revealed that the greatest contributions to this significant association were: a positive influence of DA and a negative influence of STA, respectively, on attitude to concept maps. These data now indicate a contribution of the principal learning orientations vis-à-vis student attitudes to pre-prepared concept maps when employed alongside more traditional teaching/learning activities in medical and biomedical science education, and may further suggest a role for concept maps in the support of deep learning.

Attitude↗