Adapting the Nurse Practitioner Primary Care Organizational Climate Questionnaire for Acute Care Nurse Practitioners.

Background and Purpose: This study adapted the Nurse Practitioner Primary Care Organizational Climate Questionnaire to measure the organizational climate of nurse practitioners in acute care settings and validated the Nurse Practitioner Acute Care Organizational Climate Questionnaire (NP-ACOCQ). Methods: We used a three-phase instrument adaptation design. In phase 1, experts assessed face and content validity. In phase 2, pilot testing enabled item analysis and preliminary reliability testing. In phase 3, field testing supported exploratory factor analysis. Results: The NP-ACOCQ had a three-factor structure representing subscales. The subscales had Cronbach's alphas of 0.87, 0.90, and 0.94. The subscales, Institutional Visibility, Interprofessional Relationships, and Organizational Autonomy each had between 5 and 13 items. Conclusions: The NP-ACOCQ is a valid and reliable measure to assess organizational factors determining the acute care nurse practitioner work environment.

Individual and Age Differences in Item and Context Memory.

We investigated whether individuals who are good at recognizing previously presented items are also good at recognizing the context in which items were presented. We focused specifically on whether the relation between item recognition and context recognition abilities differs in younger and older adults. It has been hypothesized that context memory declines more rapidly in older adults due to an age-related deficit in associative binding or recollection. To test this hypothesis, younger and older adults were asked to remember lists of names and objects, as well as the context (i.e. their size, location, and color) that accompanied those items. Following presentation of each list, recognition tests for items and context were administered. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) models analyzing both item and context scores together provided no evidence of separate factors for item and context memory. Instead, the best-fitting model separated performance by item-type, regardless of context, and no differences were found in the structure of these abilities in younger and older adults. These findings are consistent with the limited previous latent variable research on context memory in aging suggesting that there is no context recognition memory ability separable from item memory in younger nor older adults. Instead, individual differences in recognition memory abilities may be specific to the domain of the studied stimulus.

Guilty, Innocent, or Just Not Proven? Bayesian Verdicts in the Case of Inhibitory Deficits.

Background: This study addresses two issues: Whether age-related differences in working memory (WM) can be studied in online samples, and whether such differences reflect an inhibitory deficit. Currently, the evidence is mixed, but the playing field was not level because traditional statistics cannot provide evidence for the null hypothesis.Experiment 1: MTurk workers (ages 19-74) performed simple and complex visuospatial WM tasks to determine whether a secondary task affected the rate of age-related decline. Performance on both tasks replicated previous laboratory studies, establishing that age-related differences in WM can be studied online. Bayesian analyses revealed it is ten times as likely that there is no inhibitory deficit on visuospatial WM tasks as that there is.Experiment 2: The effects of irrelevant location information on visuospatial WM were examined in older (Mage = 64.0) and younger (Mage = 25.0) MTurk workers. Irrelevant locations produced interference, but both groups were equally affected. Bayesian analyses provided support for the null hypothesis of no age difference.Conclusions: The results of both experiments on working memory not only revealed equivalent visuospatial inhibitory function in older and younger adults, they also demonstrated that age-related differences in visuospatial WM can be effectively studied online as well as in the laboratory.