The purpose of this exploratory descriptive study was to examine a process model of the nervios experience of 30 Mexican seasonal farm workers. Focused interviews were conducted in Spanish to determine the workers' perspectives on their experiences of nervios while residing in rural, southwest Ontario. Data for analysis originated from variables created to represent key themes that had emerged from open coding of the interviews. Simultaneous entry, multiple regression analyses revealed that provocation, control salience, and cognitive sensory motor distress directly explained 67.2% of the variation in worker expressions of negative affectivity. The combination fear, feeling trapped, and giving in mediated the relationship of provocation, control salience and cognitive sensory motor distress to expressions of negative affectivity (R(2) = 88.1%). Control salience and its dampening effect on other elements of the nervios experience, however, appeared to be key to whether subjects experienced negative reactions to being provoked or distressed. This evidence points to nervios being a powerful, holistic idiom of distress with at least six variables contributing to its affective negativity. This information is important to our understanding of how nervios unfolds and for accurate specification of a nervios model for clinical practice and research. It also sets the stage for improved therapeutic alliances with nervios sufferers, and social action to reduce factors that provoke nervios.

These findings provide encouragement for nurses to further develop and investigate cognitive strategies to treat psychiatric symptoms of voice hearers.

This article examines nerves among participants in the Canada/Mexico Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (C/MSAWP). Based on in-depth interviews with 30 Mexican farm workers in southwestern Ontario, we demonstrate that nerves embodies the distress of economic need, relative powerlessness, and the contradictions inherent in the C/MSAWP that result in various life's lesions. We also explore their use of the nerves idiom as an embodied metaphor for their awareness of the breakdown in self/society relations and, in certain cases, of the lack of control over even themselves. This article contributes to that body of literature that locates nerves at the "normal" end of the "normal/abnormal" continuum of popular illness categories because, despite the similarities in symptoms of nerves among Mexican farm workers and those of anxiety and/or mood disorders, medicalization has not occurred. If nerves has not been medicalized among Mexican farm workers, neither has it given rise to resistance to their relative powerlessness as migrant farm workers. Nonetheless, nerves does serve as an effective vehicle for expressing their distress within the context of the C/MSAWP.

The purpose of the study was to establish the validity and reliability of an instrument for the measurement of caregiver strain, the Parent Caregiver Strain Questionnaire (PCSQ), with data from 283 adult children who were providing care to a neurologically impaired patient. Principal axis factor analysis of data rotated to an oblimin solution revealed five well-defined, first-order factors that explained 59% of the total variance in caregiver strain. The five-factors were interrelated with caregiver strain as theoretically predicted. Coefficient alphas for the five factors were in the range from .74 to .93. The findings provide beginning evidence of the adequacy of the PCSQ, and favor continued investigation into the theoretical and psychometric properties of the instrument.

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