This T32 whose goal is to provide pre- and postdoctoral research training for nurses who are pursuing research careers focused on childbearing, childrearing, and caregiving families with a variety of health and illness issues. The area of inquiry is conceptualized as a combination of family life cycle stage and health/illness need. The narrative includes one paragraph on family life cycle (Duvall) concepts and a second paragraph on health and illness concepts. A cube figure (page 57) depicts relationships between key concepts: 1) levels of prevention on one dimension (health promotion, risk reduction, health restoration); 2) care settings on a second dimension (home, community-base facilities, inpatient facilities); and, 3) family life cycle as the third dimension (emerging family, families with young children, families with school age children/adolescents, and caregiving families. As stated in the narrative, """"""""Today, families also expand through addition of young and middle adult family members who require care from other family members."""""""" The program will support 2 postdoctoral fellows for 2 years each (in 4 of 5 years of the grant) and 9 predoctoral trainees (6 for 2 years each and 3 in the last year of the grant). There will be encouragement for predoctoral trainees to seek external support to complete their dissertation research (e.g. NRSA individual awards). To be eligible for support, predoctoral trainees must not have completed their course work, which is expected to be completed in the first 2 years of their program. The program consists of 4 integrated activities: course work, training seminars, supervised research practicum, and independent research. Course work is divided into 3 areas: prerequisites, nursing science and methods, and specialized courses pertinent to the trainee's research interests. Doctoral students take 2 specialized courses to develop expertise in their area of interest. NRSA trainees will be required to take NURS 615 focused on childbearing, childrearing, and caregiving offered every other summer. This course offering was not available at the time the institutional NRSA was first submitted. Postdoctoral fellows will be encouraged to take this course. Then, predoctoral trainees must take a second course that fits their research focus. Every NRSA pre- and postdoctoral trainee/fellow must now take the course on research ethics offered through the psychology department at Case Western. In addition to course work, all trainees/fellows will participate in the research training seminars offered for one semester per year on a weekly basis. In addition they will have a minimum of 240 hours of a supervised research practicum, which have led to numerous joint student-faculty presentations and publications at professional meetings and in scholarly publications. Postdoctoral fellows also attend the research training seminars, are encouraged to take the nursing summer seminar on childbearing, childrearing, and caregiving offered every other year, and must take the psychology course on ethics in research. There is an expectation for the completion of at least one abstract for submission for presentation, one manuscript to a refereed journal, and the development of a pilot dataset to support subsequent research in the area. Fellows are encouraged to prepare a draft of a federal research grant application.
