This article examines how cultural misunderstandings and language differences generate ethical dilemmas in crosscultural nursing. It explores the consequences of actions that result when health care providers lack an awareness of the value systems of patients that differ from their own. Described are the principles arising from ethical theory, their application to nursing, and incorporation int...

Concerns of infectious disease outbreaks have recently reached the forefront of global security issues and resulted in new engagements among foreign science advisors, host country scientists, and officials. There are lessons to be learned from the numerous organizations working in global regions of endemic disease who are building capacity to survey pathogens and prevent and contain epidemics. ...

Colors and odors are associated; for instance, people typically match the smell of strawberries to the color pink or red. These associations are forms of crossmodal correspondences. Recently, there has been discussion about the extent to which these correspondences arise for structural reasons (i.e., an inherent mapping between color and odor), statistical reasons (i.e., covariance in experienc...

The Bible is a cross-cultural (cc) training document. It has the only absolutes that we possess. A member of any culture can use it safely to relate both to God and to fellow humans. Ted Ward, a missiologist, has said that commonalties outweigh differences among people. We are more alike than dissimilar. The image of God rests on all people (Gen. 1:27). All people have a longing for eternity in...

Ethics in relation to the practice of medicine had continuity from the time of Hippocrates (ca. 460-377 BC) to the 1970s focusing on the physician-patient relationship and moral obligations of beneficence and nonmaleficence. In the 1970s developments such as the gene splicing method and in vitro fertilization (IVF) created concerns about the adequacy of these long-established moral obligations ...

This paper presents a longitudinal study of the course ‘High-tech Entrepreneurship and New Media’. The course design is based on socio-cultural theories of learning and considers the role of social capital in entrepreneurial networks. By integrating student teams into the communities of practice of local start-ups, we offer learning opportunities to students, companies, and academia. The studen...

CONTEXT Two recent reports from the Institute of Medicine cited cross-cultural training as a mechanism to address racial and ethnic disparities in health care, but little is known about residents' educational experience in this area. OBJECTIVE To assess residents' attitudes about cross-cultural care, perceptions of their preparedness to deliver quality care to diverse patient populations, and...

Personas are a method to communicate data about users and to aid in the perception of users. The method is supposed to create a shared perception of the users that is not built on preconceived ideas, but on field data. The paper presents an experiment where the same persona description was sent to 16 participants in 9 countries. The participants were asked to return a photo that resembled the p...

Cross-cultural psychopharmacology seeks to determine whether there are differences in responses to psychopharmacologic agents among various ethnic groups and the reason for such variations. During the past four decades numerous clinical reports have addressed potential differences in therapeutic dosages and side effects of psychotropic medications between various ethnic groups. In addition, sev...

Cross-cultural user-interface designers should account for dimensions of cultures, e.g., the cultural anthropologist Hofstede's five dimensions when they conside potential design strategies. Recent publications suggest other deep cultural influences on the way people think, act, and feel, which suggest there may be cultural biases in traditional industry usability precepts.