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Before going into battle, Roman generals would donate a goat to their favorite god and ask their neighborhood temple priest to interpret a pile of pigeon poop to predict if they would take down the Greeks over on the next island. Americans in the nineteenth century had fortune tellers read their hands read and phrenologists check out the bumps on their heads. Statistics came along by the late 1800s, then “scientific polls” which did something similar.

The post Why are Americans addicted to polls? appeared first on OUPblog.

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Simon & Schuster has formed a sales and distribution agreement with Gallup Press, the publishing division of the research firm Gallup.

Beginning January 1, 2016, Simon & Schuster will run the English language sales and distribution in all territories worldwide for Gallup Press’s new and backlist publishing in print and digital formats. The Gallup Press catalog includes more than 30 titles geared towards professionals with a focus on things like leadership, education and entrepreneurship including titles such as StrengthsFinder 2.0, Strengths Based Leadership and How Full Is Your Bucket?

“Nobody knows more about the attitudes and behaviors of the world’s employees, customers, students and citizens and  this understanding is reflected in the phenomenal sales of their books,” stated Steve Black, vice president of client services at Simon & Schuster. “We are thrilled for the opportunity to build on their record of bestselling success.”

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A little more than a week ago I said goodbye to my Penn students.

It wasn't easy.

When we take risks as teachers, when we allow ourselves to get involved, when we are willing to care, to get hurt, to go out on a limb, to push the student who doesn't want to be pushed, the goodbye-ing is hard and heartbreaking.

And yet is clear, at least to me, to a certain Gallup/Purdue University team, and to the writer of this recent New York Times op-ed, that that kind of caring—invisible to most—can make a long-term difference. Engagement. Well-being. Those are the factors on the table.

Here is the Times' Charles Blow:

I was surrounded by professors who were almost parentally protective and proud of me — encouraging me to follow my passions (Yes, start that magazine, Charles), helping me win internships, encouraging me to go away and work for a semester, and cheering me on as I became a member of a fraternity and editor of the student newspaper. And, because of them, I emerged from college brimming with confidence — too much at times, depending on whom you ask — and utterly convinced that there was nothing beyond my ability to achieve, if only I was willing to work, hard, for it.

As it turns out, these are the kinds of college experiences that predict whether a person will later be engaged in work and have a high level of well-being after graduation.

 The Gallup and Purdue University research underscores what seems intuitively obvious but is also, often, institutionally ignored. That it matters, for example, that professors get students excited about learning. That it matters that professors care about the students. That it matters that shed some light and some encouragement on the dimensions of their dreams.

Common sense? Absolutely.

But how many times have I been told by a student that I am one of the only professors who knew his name? His name. How many times have I (excited, too) watched a student discover some new part of her soul, some new crazy ambition, and been told: I didn't know this was okay? My classroom is small, and that is my first good fortune. Many writing professors' classrooms are. But I'd be kidding myself if I thought the first order of business there was to churn out 15 capable bloggers or five new memoirists. My job is to assign the right texts, announce the right exercises, distribute the right critiques, build trust, strengthen community—and pay attention to the students as they each arrive. Look up into their faces, take note of their splinted fingers, read their moods, address the temperature of their days, make room for diversions and tangents that can matter right in that moment, and forever.

My job is to know them, to care about them, to nurture.

It isn't hard. It's merely human.

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By Mary Jo Kreitzer

Since 2005, more than 80% of Americans have rated nurses on a Gallup poll as having “high” or “very high” honesty and ethical standards. In fact, nurses have topped the list since 1999, the first year Gallup asked about them with the exception of 2001. (That year, Gallup included firefighters on a one-time basis, given their prominent role in 9/11 rescue efforts.) What many people don’t understand is that their nurse’s level of education is a life or death matter. In a study just published in Health Affairs, a nurse researcher found that a 10-point increase in the percentage of nurses holding a 4-year BSN degree within a hospital was associated with an average reduction of 2.12 deaths for every 1,000 patients. For more seriously ill patients, the average reduction in deaths was 7.47 per 1,000 patients.

For anybody who has experienced health care, these statistics aren’t surprising. Nurses are the glue that holds much of health care together. Nurse practitioners can effectively manage 80% of primary care with outcomes that equal or exceed physician care. Nurse anesthetists manage care during surgical procedures, nurse midwives deliver babies, and nurses provide care in homes, clinics, senior living centers, schools, and hospitals.

One of the things that excites me these days is that in all of these settings, more and more nurses are practicing integrative nursing – care that focuses on the whole person and uses integrative therapies and healing practices to manage symptoms, ease suffering, and improve quality of life. What does this mean? If you’re experiencing nausea because of your illness or the effects of treatments such as chemotherapy, you might be offered aromatherapy or acupressure before resorting to a drug that’s more expensive, may be less effective, and may cause side effects. If you’re anxious or having difficulty sleeping, you may be taught ways to breathe and relax or be encouraged to practice mindfulness meditation. Nurses practicing from an integrative perspective are eager to help you learn how to better manage your own health and wellbeing, not just deal with the crisis or problem you’re facing at the moment.

Integrative nursing is good for nurses as well as patients. I’ve observed that care settings that embrace integrative nursing are finding that nurses are attracted to work in their organizations, find their practice more fulfilling, and are more engaged and less likely to leave. For the past five years, I have co-led a new educational program at the University of Minnesota – a doctorate of nursing practice (DNP) program in integrative health and healing. This program prepares nurse leaders who work in clinical — as well as in community and corporate — settings. As the first program of its kind, it’s attracting students from around the United States.

Mary Jo Kreitzer is the Director of the Center for Spirituality & Healing, and a Professor for the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota. She is also a co-editor of Integrative Nursing, a title from the Weil Integrative Medicine Library.

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Image Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Eddie Harrison, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Elvin Lim

New York has just become the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage, together with Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Iowa, and the District of Columbia. New Jersey, Maryland, and Rhode Island have not legalized same-sex marriage, but they do recognize those performed in other states. State by state, the dominoes against same-sex marriage are falling away as surely as reason must conquer unreason. President Barack Obama has been accused of allowing a state governor, Mario Cuomo, to be the leader on this issue. But on this issue, Obama’s hesitation and characteristic equivocation might turn out to be strategically, if unintentionally, wise, because civil rights issues are most effectively advanced by state legislatures, not national institutions.

Consider the bittersweet record of the Civil Rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the lesser known Loving v. Virginia (1967) (which legalized inter-racial marriage) were landmark Supreme Court decisions. But they created decades of backlash, most easily exemplified by the busing controversy as well as the “special rights” retort — the argument that a too-ready conferral of alleged rights to identity groups creates an atomistic society and a government with more obligations than it can or ought to fulfill — the lead argument against affirmative action policies today. In 1967, the year inter-racial marriage was made legal by “judicial activism,” 72 percent of Americans were opposed to inter-racial marriage. It was not until 1991, 35 years later, that these Americans became a minority. Brown and Loving gave us the right decisions, but not necessary with the smartest strategy.

The history of the same-sex marriage movement in the mid-2000s exhibited the same one step forward, two step backwards tendency when it tried to follow in the strategic footsteps of the Civil Rights movement, by way of Courts. In 2004, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts declared, in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, that it’s inconsistent with the State’s constitution to limit marriage only to opposite-sex couples. Massachusetts became the first US state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples; a triumphant first hurrah, but ultimately a harbinger of backlash, including a national movement to amend the US constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman, and the passage of amendments in 11 state constitutions to the same on election day. 2004 would be remembered as the of anti-same-sex-marriage backlash, not the year when the movement for marriage equality started.

But something remarkable happened in the last few years, when the movement decided that the “special rights” retort was too powerful to overcome. The movement suspended its alliance with the Courts, and turned, as presidential candidates must, to a state-by-state strategy. In doing this, the movement drove a knife into the the heart of the anti-same-sex-marriage argument. The argument against “activist judges” — a procedural argument that disguises the moral disgust — cannot stand when state legislatures comprised of elected officials redefine the meaning of marriage. Just seven years after a national hysteria against “judicial activism,” conservative groups are now left with one of two choices: either come out (no pun intended) and articulate the real moral or religious reasons why they are against same-se

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Gallup reported last week that President Obama’s job approval among Independent voters dipped to 38 percent, the lowest support he has ever received from this group of voters.

It would be too easy for Democrats to blame these numbers on the Tea Party movement. Some Independents are Tea Partiers – and those the President has forever lost – but not all Independents are Tea Partiers.

To understand why Obama has lost so many other Independents, we need to understand that Independents are a curious bunch. They don’t believe in partisan loyalty, yet they are notoriously fickle. They may be fairer than Fox and more balanced than MSNBC, and yet because they are beholden neither to personalities nor parties, but to issues, their love for a politician can be vanquished as quickly as s/he fails to perform.

Politicians love to chase Independents, but they best remember that when push comes to shove, Independents cut to the chase. Independents have determined that on too many of Obama’s campaign promises – the closing of Guantanamo Bay, the public (health-care) option, comprehensive energy and immigration reform, ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – the President is either foot-dragging or has simply failed to deliver. Part of this, to be sure, is systemic. Most presidents suffer from lower approval ratings in their second year in office because they become victims of the (required) big talk in the year before which had gotten them elected in the first place. But Obama must also take especial responsibility for so unrestrainedly tantalizing his base during the 2008 campaign and then so abruptly disenchanting them when the realities of governance stepped in. When even the Liberal faith in Obama falters, Independents can hardly be expected to hold the fort.

In recent days, the president’s firing of General McChrystal and his handling of the Gulf oil-spill has only confirmed the Independent voter’s growing conviction that Obama is not displaying the perspicacity of a president in charge. There is a sense of chaos, that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” or, as Jimmy Carter fatefully put in the potentially analogous summer of 1979, that the nation is suffering “a crisis of confidence.”

The White House is in full-scale damage-control, dispatching both the President and the Vice President on the campaign road, and sending David Axelrod on the Sunday talk-shows to talk their way out of this one. This is completely counter-productive.

Independents voted for Obama because he was not a Washington insider, believing that because he was not obligated or loyal to Democratic apparatchiks as the Clinton machine presumably was, he would be able get things done. More talk is only going to

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