Friends and rivals, Edith Wharton\u27s women

Based on primary research, my dissertation, Friends and Rivals, Edith Wharton\u27s Women, examines the two plots that the author used throughout her career. Her dominant plot is outlined in Souls Belated (1899), the tale of a women who escapes a conventionaly stifling marriage only to discover that she and her lover have no choice but to duplicate the union she has just fled. It shows the ways in which Wharton challenged but never escaped the restrictions of the marriage plot. The following year she wrote Friends (1900), a story that overtly articulates the subplot that I trace in her fiction. As its name suggests, it is about the meaning and demands of friendship, and its key elements inform nearly all her novels. Women, who seem to be opposites but who are in reality more similar than dissimilar, become the means for the other\u27s growth. By learning to see from the other\u27s perspective, they realize that self-sacrifice gives life meaning and purpose. Using feminist, biographical, and to some extent psychological methodologies. I analyze Wharton\u27s concerns with the allure and danger of romanticism, the development of consciousness, the importance of female artistry, and the continuation of personal and literary traditions in the context of her period and from the dual perspectives of competition and cooperation

Enabling research in care homes : an evaluation of a national network of research ready care homes

© 2014 Davies et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise statedIn the UK care homes are one of the main providers of long term care for older people with dementia. Despite the recent increase in care home research, residents with dementia are often excluded from studies. Care home research networks have been recommended by the Ministerial Advisory Group on Dementia Research (MAGDR) as a way of increasing research opportunities for residents with dementia. This paper reports on an evaluation of the feasibility and early impact of an initiative to increase care home participation in researchPeer reviewe

An investigation into improving scientific literacy in Israeli university students within an academic English reading programme

The commitment to improving scientific literacy is voiced by governments throughout the world. One of the main objectives is the development of an informed and active citizenry able to participate in decision-making processes concerning socio-scientific issues (SSIs). There is a growing literature which suggests that engaging with the complexity of SSIs demands a high level of critical-thinking skills. These skills include: open-mindedness, independence, and scepticism. This three-year long study attempted to develop an intervention which will, in particular, provide subjects with an ability to be more open-minded, evaluate counter opinions, and respect those holding such opinions. The importance of developing an ability to value the ‘other’ emerged from years of teaching academic English within an Israeli university, where initiating fruitful classroom discussion was problematic. The lack of dialogue resulted from individuals voicing strongly held opinions and seeming to be unable to acknowledge, and evaluate opposing views. This project was designed as an action research study. Both quantitative and qualitative data was collected, and analysed within an interpretive framework. As both the researcher and researched, many of my teaching methods were modified during the course of this study, including the introduction of pair-work in class. The study was conducted in three cycles over three consecutive years, primarily with two classes (one humanities and one science) in the pre-academic, mechina, program of an Israeli university. The mechina is a year-long programme and the students I taught had a single semester of English. This meant that three different cohorts of students were studied, (there were always 25-30 students in each class, so about 50 students were studied each year). The classes I taught were proficient in English, and were required to do a research project as part of the course. This project became my intervention. I developed a project based on devil’s advocate which required them to choose an SSI that interested them, write a statement of their opinion, and then, much to their astonishment, find evidence to support the counter opinion. I gave a lesson on how to evaluate sources available on the internet. Although the project was set up as a standard research exercise, which is what they expected, the majority of students identified that this project made them more aware of the value of counter opinions – more ‘open-minded’. The primary method for collecting feedback on the project, and on other aspects of my course, utilized a projective technique – students wrote their views anonymously on a piece of paper; these are then analysed by coding the responses. This study also employed questionnaires, which were given to all students. These showed that the majority had little or no science education in high school, and yet registered high levels of interest in science and technology on a three-level Likert item. These findings add support to research that shows the more science studied in high school the lower the interest in the subject. Furthermore, by including a standard VOSTS (Views On Science-Technology-Society) I was able to show that my students believed the general public should participate in governmental decisions relating to SSIs. Responses to open-ended questions showed that most students, including those in the humanities, believed everyone should take science courses at university, and should have science classes in school (though not the current curriculum). In conclusion, this research indicated that interest in science was not related to studying the current school science curriculum. And feedback from the intervention demonstrated that students could be aware of a change in their cognitive skills, and independently acknowledge the importance of being open-minded – an important step towards promoting an active, informed, scientifically literate society

A Renter or Homeowner Nation?

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the U.S. homeownership rate increased by nearly 20 percentage points, from mid-40 to mid-60 percent. The self-amortizing 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage, introduced by the Federal Housing Administration/Veterans Administration (VA—now the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs) transformed the United States from a nation of renters to a nation of homeowners (Acolin and Wachter, 2015; Fetter, 2013)

Comparison of the NEI-VFQ and OSDI questionnaires in patients with Sjögren's syndrome-related dry eye

BACKGROUND: To examine the associations between vision-targeted health-related quality of life (VT-HRQ) and ocular surface parameters in patients with Sjögren's syndrome, a systemic autoimmune disease characterized by dry eye and dry mouth. METHODS: Forty-two patients fulfilling European / American diagnostic criteria for Sjögren's syndrome underwent Schirmer testing without anesthesia, ocular surface vital dye staining; and measurement of tear film breakup time (TBUT). Subjects were administered the Ocular Surface Disease Index (OSDI) and the 25-item National Eye Institute Vision Functioning Questionnaire (NEI-VFQ). Main outcome measures included ocular surface parameters, OSDI subscales describing ocular discomfort (OSDI-symptoms), vision-related function (OSDI-function), and environmental triggers, and NEI-VFQ subscales. RESULTS: Participants (aged 31–81 y; 95% female) all had moderate to severe dry eye. Associations of OSDI subscales with the ocular parameters were modest (Spearman r (ρ) < 0.22) and not statistically significant. Associations of NEI-VFQ subscales with the ocular parameters reached borderline significance for the near vision subscale with TBUT (ρ = 0.32, p = .05) and for the distance vision subscale with van Bijsterveld score (ρ = 0.33, p = .04). The strongest associations of the two questionnaires were for: ocular pain and mental function with OSDI-symptoms (ρ = 0.60 and 0.45, respectively); and general vision, ocular pain, mental function, role function, and driving with OSDI-function (ρ = 0.60, 0.50, 0.61, 0.64, 0.57, and 0.67, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: Associations between conventional objective measures of dry eye and VT-HRQ were modest. The generic NEI-VFQ was similar to the disease-specific OSDI in its ability to measure the impact of Sjögren's syndrome-related dry eye on VT-HRQ