Correlación entre la personalidad y los factores de la Teoría del Comportamiento Planeado (TCP) en adolescentes escolarizados de 11-19 años del Caribe Colombiano

The increasing rate of pregnancies in teenagers and the high incident of the infections of sexual transmission (HIV/ AIDS, for example), these are health related issues (and especially the sexual and reproductive health), which have received great attention on the part of investigators and of the public opinion in general. Recently, there has been evidenced that teenagers carry out very easily risk sexual behaviors, and those who have not presented the above mentioned behaviors also show high levels of intention to carry out them. There is the hypothesis that besides cognitive variables such as attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control and intention, the personality of the young persons is an aspect that plays an important paper in their sexual and reproductive health. Significant correlations were found between the variales of the TPB and the personality traits; the results suggest that the direction of these correlations is associated with the specific type of behavior or situation that is assessed. Keywords: personality, theory of planned behavior, adolescents, reproductive sexuality.

Modelling end-of-life care practices: Factors associated with critical care nurse engagement in care provision

Objective To identify factors associated with critical care nurses’ engagement in end-of-life care practices. Methods Multivariable regression modelling was undertaken on 392 responses to an online self-report survey of end-of-life care practices and factors influencing practice by Australian critical care nurses’. Univariate general linear models were built for six end-of-life care practice areas. Results Six statistically significant (p < 0.001) models were developed: Information sharing F(3, 377) = 40.53, adjusted R2 23.8%; Environmental modification F(5, 380) = 19.55, adjusted R2 19.4%; Emotional support F(10, 366) = 12.10, adjusted R2 22.8%; Patient and family centred decision making F(8, 362) = 17.61 adjusted R2 26.4%; Symptom management F(8, 376) = 7.10, adjusted R2 11.3%; and Spiritual support F(9, 367) = 14.66, adjusted R2 24.6%. Stronger agreement with values consistent with a palliative approach, and greater support for patient and family preferences were associated with higher levels of engagement in end-of-life care practices. Higher levels of preparedness and access to opportunities for knowledge acquisition were associated with engagement in the interpersonal practices of patient and family centred decision making and emotional support. Conclusion This study provides evidence for interventions to address factors associated with nurse engagement to increase participation in all end-of-life care practice areas.

An alternative view of small firm adaptation

Increasingly, small firms with a history tied to a specific geographic location are having their survival threatened by new and innovative web-based entrants. This paper considers the plight of such firms and proposes an alternative means to reflect on how they may or may not learn about such threats. Adopting an evolutionary perspective, the construct absorptive capacity is used to highlight the deficiencies of current market orientation theory to explain the process of firm learning. The conceptual model of evolutionary potential provides a framework through which both the firm and its owner/s' abilities to learn can be taken into account.

A deadline-constrained 802.11 MAC Protocol with QoS differentiation for soft real-time control

As one of the most widely used wireless network technologies, IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) have found a dramatically increasing number of applications in soft real-time networked control systems (NCSs). To fulfill the real-time requirements in such NCSs, most of the bandwidth of the wireless networks need to be allocated to high-priority data for periodic measurements and control with deadline requirements. However, existing QoS-enabled 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocols do not consider the deadline requirements explicitly, leading to unpredictable deadline performance of NCS networks. Consequentially, the soft real-time requirements of the periodic traffic may not be satisfied, particularly under congested network conditions. This paper makes two main contributions to address this problem in wireless NCSs. Firstly, a deadline-constrained MAC protocol with QoS differentiation is presented for IEEE 802.11 soft real-time NCSs. It handles periodic traffic by developing two specific mechanisms: a contention-sensitive backoff mechanism, and an intra-traffic-class QoS differentiation mechanism. Secondly, a theoretical model is established to describe the deadline-constrained MAC protocol and evaluate its performance of throughput, delay and packet-loss ratio in wireless NCSs. Numerical studies are conducted to validate the accuracy of the theoretical model and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new MAC protocol.

The role of moral disengagement in underage drinking and heavy episodic drinking

Objectives The current study had two aims. First, to develop a moral disengagement scale contextualized to underage drinking. Second, to investigate Bandura’s (1986) self-regulatory model within the context of underage drinking. Method Two different samples of students participated in the study. The first sample included 619 (362 females) adolescents (Mage = 15.3 years, SD = 1.09 years) and the second sample 636 (386 females) adolescents (Mage = 15.3 years, SD = 1.03 years). Students in the first sample completed the Underage Drinking Disengagement Scale (UDDS), and measures of engagement in underage drinking and heavy episodic drinking. Students in the second sample completed these measures as well as scales of general moral disengagement, personal standards and anticipatory guilt associated with underage drinking. Results For the UDDS, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses verified a single factor structure. The UDDS was more strongly associated with engagement in underage drinking and heavy episodic drinking than a general measure of moral disengagement. A moderated mediation analysis revealed that adolescents who negatively evaluated underage drinking reported more anticipatory guilt, and more anticipatory guilt was associated with less engagement in underage drinking and less heavy episodic drinking. This relationship was weaker at high compared to low levels of underage drinking disengagement. Conclusions/Importance Understanding how adolescents self-regulate their drinking, and ways that such self-regulation may be deactivated or disengaged, may help identify those adolescents at increased risk of drinking underage and of engaging in heavy episodic drinking.