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The article reports a study of workplace bullying in community nurses in an NHS trust. The aims were to determine the prevalence of bullying, to examine the association between bullying and occupational health outcomes, and to investigate whether support at work could moderate the effects of bullying. Forty-four percent of nurses reported experiencing one or more types of bullying in the previous 12 months, compared to 35 percent of other staff. Fifty percent of nurses had witnessed the bullying of others. Nurses who had been bullied reported significantly lower levels of job satisfaction and significantly higher levels of anxiety, depression and propensity to leave. They were also more critical of aspects of the organizational climate of the trust. Support at work was able to protect nurses from some of the damaging effects of bullying.

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ABSTRACT. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of sleep problems in 200 children with severe mental handicap. Sleep problems were exiremely common: 51% of children had settling problems. 67% of children had waking problems, and 32% of parents said they rarely got enough sleep. Sleep problems were also very persistent: between a half and two‐thirds of children who exhibited sleep problems ai Time 1 still had them 3 years later. Sleep problems were associated with a number of child characteristics: poor communication skills, poor academic skills, poor self‐help skills, incontinence, daytime behaviour problems and epilepsy. There were no relationships with family variables such as social class, income, family composition or housing tenure. However, maternal stress, maternal irritability and pwrceived impact on the family were related to sleep problems. A Sleep Index was constructed, and path analysis was used to trace the main causal pathways of the child, family and social characteristics. Ten variables explained 50% of the variance in the Sleep Problems Index. Communication skills played a pivotal role. The implications of the findings for intervention strategies are discussed.

The paper reports a prospective longitudinal comparison of the Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, 1966) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1985) in which the ability of the models to predict and understand the factors determining use of protective helmets among 162 schoolboy cyclists was examined by path analysis.The TPB emerged with greater economy and less redundancy than the HBM. A second path analysis examined whether intention, which is not included among the original components of the HBM, might mediate the links between the predictor variables and behaviour, and this proved to be correct. Lastly, the effects of prior behaviour were examined and found to have a significant effect on helmet use in both models. It was concluded that the TPB had greater predictive utility than the HBM. The implications of the fmdings are discussed and suggestions for future research are offered.