This article reports a survey of nurses in different cultural settings to reveal their perceptions of ethical role responsibilities relevant to nursing practice. Drawing on the Confucian theory of ethics, the first section attempts to understand nursing ethics in the context of multiple role relationships. The second section reports the administration of the Role Responsibilities Questionnaire (RRQ) to a sample of nurses in China (n = 413), the USA (n = 163), and Japan (n = 667). Multidimensional preference analysis revealed the patterns of rankings given by the nurses to the statements they considered as important ethical responsibilities. The Chinese nurses were more virtue based in their perception of ethical responsibilities, the American nurses were more principle based, and the Japanese nurses were more care based. The findings indicate that the RRQ is a sensitive instrument for outlining the embedded sociocultural factors that influence nurses' perceptions of ethical responsibilities in the realities of nursing practice. This study could be important in the fostering of partnerships in international nursing ethics.
This article discusses the serious problem of the shortage of about 50,000 nurses in Japan today. If efficient measures to solve it are not adopted by administrators, it is clear that the shortage will become still more alarming in the future, in a society with more people in advanced years and in which the numbers in the younger generation will decrease from now on. The main factors behind the Japanese nursing labour shortage are, among others: a rapid increase in the number of hospital beds between 1986 and 1989, poor working conditions; and nurses' low social position in their places of work. Behind these factors, there has always been a contempt for the art of nursing in our society. Why has Japanese society made light of nursing? Three points can be identified: traditional discrimination against women; our disregard for a religious mentality; and our short history of hospital nursing. To overcome these problems, we must first of all change fundamentally our sense of values, such as love for one another and compassion. We must now reconstruct a caring culture in our society.
In spite of the fact that the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred nearly 60 years ago, there has been very little psychosocial research on the long-term effects of these unprecedented nuclear attacks on its victims. In this qualitative study, we use psychosocial literature from the Holocaust in order to help understand the effects of this man-made tragedy. We analyzed semi-structured interviews taken with 8 survivors of the bombs--5 from Nagasaki and 3 from Hiroshima. Our research questions were: When the survivors talk about their experiences, what do they focus on and with what are they preoccupied? What can we learn about the long-term effects of the experiences from both psychological and physical aspects? And, where does the A-bomb experience "fit" into the survivors' lives? Our analyses showed that there were 9 main themes that emerged from the interviews that could be grouped into two main categories--themes connected to the experience itself and themes connected to life afterward. We discuss the implications of these themes on the personal, social, and cultural levels and offer suggestions concerning ideas for dealing with the trauma.
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