How do the relationships among health phenomena explain the nursing students’ quality of life?

Background and objective: To know the direct relationships between stress, sleep quality, depressive symptoms, resiliency, and quality of life of nursing students. Less is known about how the simultaneous relationships between these variables may explain the nursing students’ quality of life remains unclear. We assessed how the simultaneous causal relationships among stress, depressive symptoms, sleep quality, and resilience explain the nursing students’ quality of life one year after starting a nursing degree program.Methods: This was a one-year longitudinal study. Data were gathered with validated tools from first university-year nursing students enrolled in two public Brazilian universities at the beginning (n = 117) and end (n = 100) of March 2016. The latent variable analysis- a complement of the R statistical package- was used to estimate the Structural Equation Modelling.Results: The final model showed good fitness and residues quality. Stress decreased sleep quality and increased the intensity of the depressive symptoms. Both of these, directly and indirectly, reduced the quality of life. Resiliency decreased stress levels and depressive symptoms and improved sleep quality.Conclusions: The academic environment has the potential for illnesses, impacting the quality of life. On other hand, resiliency plays a protective role on nursing students by reducing stress and its negative effects. Education institutions need to rethink their curricular elements, promote resilience and create actions to promote students’ health.

Neighborhood Environment, Active Commute, and Healthy BMI in Adolescents

The prevalence of obesity has become a primary risk factor for adolescents’ health, which is an essential factor in poverty reduction and sustainable development. Physical activity can help adolescents reduce obesity risk and keep a healthy body mass index (BMI). We analyze the 2010 National Youth Physical Activity and Nutrition Survey (NYPANS) for U.S. school students from 9th to 12th grades (aging from 12 to 18). A latent variable analysis explored the relationship between adolescents’ BMI, physical activity, and physical and social environment. We found that Hispanic adolescents have higher BMI because they participate in fewer physical activities. We found that active commuting to school does not provide sufficient physical activity to keep a healthy BMI. The neighborhood environment for physical activity, such as public exercise and recreational center facilities, can reduce BMI but cannot help underweight adolescents increase BMI. Finally, spending too much leisure time on electronic entertainment, such as video games, is a dominating contributor to unhealthy BMI. These research outcomes suggest that providing a physical activity-friendly environment for adolescents, such as the facilities for physical activity in the neighborhood, is critical to a healthy BMI. Interventions that encourage physical activity and reduce leisure time on electronic entertainment to meet physical activity guidelines are also necessary.

Sustainable Growth of Social Tourism: A Growth Mixture Modeling Approach Using Heterogeneous Travel Frequency Trajectories

As travel activity has gained attention as one of the essential ways of understanding the sustainable growth of social tourism, a growing number of research projects have been conducted to elucidate the relationship between residents’ travel quantity (frequency) and quality (experience) in both macro and micro perspectives. Yet, very little research has highlighted that travel opportunities are not equally available to residents, especially a longitudinal perspective. The current study classified domestic travelers into four distinct classes using four years of longitudinal data from 5054 Korean residents. Latent growth curve modeling (LGCM) and growth mixture modeling (GMM) were employed to find out (1) the optimal number of classes, (2) the longitudinal travel frequency trajectory of each class, and (3) the distinctive demographic and travel characteristics of the four classes. This study provides some practical implications for policymakers when optimizing available resources for sustainable travel opportunities to relevant target sub-populations. Furthermore, detailed step-by-step analytic tutorials are also introduced for the extended application of longitudinal latent variable analysis in the tourism and hospitality fields, providing additional insights for relevant stakeholders.

Organizational Citizenship Behaviour and the Mediating Role of Organizational Commitment: A Study of Private Universities

This study aims to perpetuate the investigation of organizational commitment and its mediating role as it is one of the most crucial components in understanding organizational behaviour. A total of 324 samples were collected from the academics of 20 private universities in Malaysia. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS3.0 was used to perform the latent variable analysis. The results indicate transformational leadership, organizational culture, and organizational justice are the significant predictors of organizational commitment, and organizational commitment, in turn, is found to be a strong predictor of organizational citizenship behaviour. Moreover, the results of mediating analysis highlight that organizational commitment significantly mediates the hypothesized relationship. The implications of the findings are discussed and recommendations for future research are proposed.

Neither measurement error nor speed-accuracy trade-offs explain the difficulty of establishing attentional control as a psychometric construct: Evidence from a latent-variable analysis using diffusion modeling

Attentional control refers to the ability to maintain and implement a goal and goal-relevant information when facing distraction. So far, previous research has failed to substantiate strong evidence for a psychometric construct of attentional control. This has been argued to result from two methodological shortcomings: (a) the neglect of individual differences in speed-accuracy trade-offs when only speed or accuracy is used as dependent variable, and (b) the difficulty of isolating attentional control from measurement error. To overcome both issues, we combined hierarchical-Bayesian Wiener diffusion modeling with structural equation modeling. We re-analyzed the dataset from Rey-Mermet, Gade, and Oberauer (2018), which includes data from a large set of attentional-control tasks from young and older adults. Even when accounting for speed-accuracy trade-offs and removing measurement error, measures of attentional control failed to correlate with each other and to load on a latent variable. These results emphasize the necessity of rethinking attentional control.

Reader reactions to psychological perspective

In this study, we used latent variable analysis to distinguish two components of reader reactions to narrative fiction: Evaluative reaction is the extent to which a character is seen as reasonable and rational, and experiential reaction is the extent to which the reader feels similar to and identifies with the character. We found that evaluative reaction was more negative when mental access to the character was provided, while experiential reaction was decreased by the use of a first-person (as opposed to third-person) narrator. These results were explained in terms of the additional cognitive processing engendered by the these narrative techniques. In particular, we hypothesized that a paucity of mental access leads readers to make their own inferences about the character’s mental state, while the use of third-person narration leads readers to draw on their personal experience in order to appreciate the circumstances of the character.