Abstract

Premature birth, defined as birth before the completion of 37 weeks of gestation, places children at risk for medical, physical, psychosocial and neurodevelopmental impairments. These impairments may vary in severity. Beyond infancy, children born prematurely are typically not studied as a group, but rather fall within many other diagnostic labels and categories. Non-categorical research, using consequence-based measures, is a means of capturing the effect of prematurity. In this study three major areas of functioning were assessed in 9- to 11-year-old children born prematurely and a group of full-term controls: special health care needs, working memory capacity and health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Working memory is described as a pure measure of children's ability to learn, as it is the capacity to hold and process information. Health-related quality of life is a state that encompasses children's perception of and adaptation to their world, includes the children's physical, social, emotional and school environments, and acknowledges its variable effect on childhood.

Description

This dissertation has also been disseminated through the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. Dissertation/thesis number: 3503773; ProQuest document ID: 1010398515. The author still retains copyright.

Author Details

Michelle L. Kelly, PhD, CRNP, CNE

Sigma Membership

Alpha Nu

Type

Dissertation

Format Type

Text-based Document

Study Design/Type

Descriptive/Correlational

Research Approach

Quantitative Research

Keywords:

Premature Children, Children with Special Needs, Neurological Impairments

Advisor

Nancy C. Sharts-Hopko

Second Advisor

Pamela Blewitt

Degree

PhD

Degree Grantor

Villanova University

Degree Year

2012

Rights Holder

All rights reserved by the author(s) and/or publisher(s) listed in this item record unless relinquished in whole or part by a rights notation or a Creative Commons License present in this item record.

All permission requests should be directed accordingly and not to the Sigma Repository.

All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.

Review Type

None: Degree-based Submission

Acquisition

Proxy-submission

Date of Issue

2020-01-10

Full Text of Presentation

wf_yes

Share

COinS