Where Is "Home"? Value Conflicts, Identity Crises and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Identity in Myanmar Students Studying in the United States

Fully engaging in a new culture means translating oneself into a different set of cultural values, and many of the values can be foreign to the individual. The individual may face conflicting tensions between the psychological need to be a part of the new society and feelings of guilt or betrayal towards the former society, culture or self. Many international students from Myanmar, most of whom have little international experience, undergo this value and cultural translation during their time in American colleges. It is commonly assumed that something will be lost in the process of translation and that the students become more Westernized or never fit into both Myanmar and US cultures. However, the study of the narratives of the Myanmar students studying in the US reveals a more complex reality. Because individuals have multifaceted identities and many cultures and subcultures are fluctuating and intertwined with one another, the students¿ cross-cultural interactions can also help them acquire new ways of seeing things. Through their struggle to engage in the US college culture, many students display the theory of ¿cosmopolitanism¿ in their transformative identity formation process and thus, define and identify themselves beyond one set of cultural norms.

The Psychosocial Quality of Nursing Home Work

Trained observers used components of the functional job analysis technique to categorize 3,371 tasks performed by 214 nursing assistants in four nursing homes on five occasions over 12 months. The extent to which each task was oriented toward residents versus data or things was coded along with the "level of complexity" of each of these orientations. A psychosocial index was created by multiplying orientation by complexity. Three questions structured the analyses: (a) To what extent do nursing assistants' tasks involve interacting with residents, as opposed to focusing on data or manipulating things? (b) How complex are these tasks? (c) What are the implications of the task analysis data for assessing the quality of psychosocial care? Findings reveal that even among the direct care tasks (69% of total), the orientation was not predominantly toward the resident. Functional complexity of the tasks observed was consistently low. Those task types with the greatest psychosocial quality were those performed least frequently and vice versa. Implications of these results for restructuring nursing assistants' work are discussed.