Effect of Traditional Versus Nontraditional Psychosocial Fieldwork Placement on Students' Attitudes Toward Working With Individuals With Mental Illness

Date Presented 04/12/21 As OT practitioners work less with individuals with serious mental illness, educational programs are placing students in nontraditional fieldwork settings to fulfill accreditation psychosocial competencies. This study compares how traditional versus nontraditional psychosocial fieldwork placements impact students' attitudes toward working with this population. Primary Author and Speaker: Tiffany Benaroya

French validation of a measurement scale of life skills for children

Background According to WHO (2003), ‘Life skills’ are defined as psychosocial abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life. They are loosely grouped into three broad categories: cognitive for analyzing and using information, personal for developing personal agency and managing oneself, and inter-personal skills for communicating and interacting effectively with others. Skills-based health education is an approach to creating or maintaining healthy lifestyles and conditions through the development of knowledge, attitudes, and especially skills, using a variety of learning experiences, with an emphasis on participatory methods. Our aim was to develop an integrated measure of the life skills grouped into three broad categories of skills for children who are at least 9 years old. The present communication is focused on the validation in a French validation of a tool measuring social competencies in children - Weiss et al. (2014) - which represents one of the three categories of psychosocial competencies (emotional and cognitive competencies). Methods Data were collected three times during year 2017-2018: 614 questionnaire (T1), 564 (T2), 331 (T3) - 311 children filled the questionnaire three times. Three types of analyses were conducted in order to assess the validity and reliability of social competence (SPSS version 23 et AMOS version 21): Validity of construct, concurrent validity and reliability. Results The results show a high reliability and a good validity of construct and concurrent, thus indicating satisfactory psychomotor qualities. Conclusions This compendium will also assess the validity and reliability of this scale with the data collected at the other two measurement times and study the predictive validity of the scale. The same process will be applied to the cognitive skills measurement scale for validation. Acknowledgment: CPS team and schools and pupils involved.

Psychosocial Competencies, Self-Efficacy and Performance of Nurses: A Comparative Study

A nurse is a healthcare professional who focuses on autonomous and collaborative care of individuals of all ages, families, groups and communities, sick or well and in all settings. Though nursing is both an art and science but it requires psychosocial competencies in staff members i.e. proper decision making, critical thinking, coping with emotions, interpersonal relationships and effective communication. This construct abreast with competencies plays an important role in enhancing their Self-Efficacy i.e. positive evaluation of oneself. When nurses have higher self-evaluation, it also leads to their better performance in this profession. But is this issue same in private and government hospitals? Taking this perspective in mind, the present study was designed to make a comparative study of psychosocial competencies, self-efficacy and performance in nurses. A sample of 100 head nurses (50 from government and 50 from private hospitals) belonging to an age group of 40-45 years having at least 5 year job experience of same set up was selected. Psychosocial Competence Scale (Anita & Vijayalaxmi, 2007), Self-Efficacy Scale (Raif & Jerusalem, 1995) and Nursing Performance Scale (Ward & Felter, 1979) were administered to measure these variables. The results revealed that private hospital nurses scored high on psychosocial competencies, i.e. effective communication, decision making, empathy and critical thinking and also had better self-efficacy and performance as well than government hospital nurses.

Perceptions of a university subject on leadership and intrapersonal development: reflections of the scholarship recipients

Under the new 4-year undergraduate curriculum, students admitted to The Hong Kong Polytechnic University have to take a course on “Leadership and Intra-personal Development”. A subject entitled “Tomorrow’s Leaders” was developed to help students satisfy this requirement. In the second piloting exercise, five outstanding students taking this subject were invited to write reflective journals. Several common themes from these reflections are highlighted from the analyses. First, students believed there was a need for this subject. Second, the students liked the course, and they identified many positive attributes in the subject and its implementation. Third, the instructors were appreciated by the students. Fourth, the subject was seen by the students to be beneficial to their development. Finally, some suggestions for improvement were noted. When the present findings are integrated with other evaluation findings, it can be concluded that the subject is able to promote psychosocial competencies in university students taking this subject.