• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.205-211
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• 2012

Purpose: This study was performed to identify the level of stress perceived by nurses who attend dying patients in the cancer care unit; their understanding regarding end-of-life care and related training needs. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted with 151 nurses stationed at the cancer care units of four general hospitals located in Seoul and Gyeonggi province in Korea. Data were collected using self-reported questionnaires and the response rate was 96%. The data were analyzed using t-test, ANOVA and Pearson's correlation analysis. SPSS 12.0 was used for data analysis. Results: Nurses experienced a high level of stress in the end-of-life care settings. Their understanding of end-of-life care was above the mid-point of the scale while their training needs for end-of-life care was relatively high. The more experienced the nurses were, the more stressed they were, particularly due to excessive workload. Nurses who served longer in the cancer unit tended to show greater needs for end-of-life care training. Conclusion: This study found nurses perform end-of-life care with a high level of stress but with insufficient understanding, and thus, showed great needs for related training. Such findings can be useful to develop an end-of-life care training program for nurses.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.52
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• pp.171-200
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• 2003

Social workers' behaviors in their organizations are governed not only by explicit rules but by implicit rules. This study aimed to measure the extent that the implicit rules exist in social work agencies, and to assess the impact of the implicit rules on the degree of social workers' devotion, burnout, and satisfaction in their own work places. This study also endeavored to search any sort of sanctions that agencies apply against workers who refused to follow implicit rules in their organizations, along with any harms and/or benefits which organizations may experience according to the extent that the implicit rules exist. The results showed that the implicit rules do not exist so much in social work agencies in Korea. Not so many sanctions in the organizations were not found against workers who violated the implicit rules. The amount of implicit rules, however, affected the degree of damages that organizations sustained. The more implicit rules exist in the organizations, the higher was the level of social workers' devotion, burnout, and dissatisfaction in the work places. The impact of implicit rules was powerful in a few areas of work. That is, social workers were required to do whatever things at hand rather than carrying out professional tasks only. Social workers were also asked to stay way beyond the closing hour. The explicit rules were dominant in the area concerned with social work ethics. Some strategies to substantiate social work practice were suggested on the basis of careful examination of the powerful implicit rules.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.51 no.5
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• pp.613-632
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• 2016

The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene challenges public understanding of nature as a pure and singular entity removed from society, as the diagnosis confirms the earth-changing force of humans. In geography, the nature-society divide has been critically interrogated long before the diagnosis of the Anthropocene, developing several ways of theorizing nature-society relations. This paper introduces a new frontier for such theoretical endeavors: more-than-human geography. Inspired by the material and performative turn in geography and the social sciences around the 2000s, more-than-human geographers have sought to re-engage with the livingness of the world in the study of nature-society relations. Drawing on actor-network theory, non-representational theory (NRT) and vitalism, they have developed innovative ways of thinking about and relating to nature through the key concepts of 'nonhuman agency' and 'affect'. While more-than-human geography has been extensively debated and developed in recent Euro-American scholarship on cultural and economic geography, it has so far received limited attention in Korean geographical studies on nature. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing the key concepts and seminal work of more-than-human geography. I first outline four theoretical strands through which nature-society relations are perceived in geography. I then offer an overview of more-than-human geography, discussing its theoretical foundations and considering ontologies, epistemologies, politics and ethics associated with nature-society relations. Then, I compare more-than-human geography with political ecology, which is the mainstream critical approach in contemporary environmental social sciences. I would argue that more-than-human geography further challenges and develops political ecology through its heightened attention to the affective capacity of nonhumans and the methodological ethos of doing a careful political ecology. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of more-than-human geography for Korean studies on nature-society relations.