Search

We conducted a comparative cross-sectional study to examine the potential effects of a community-led total sanitation (CLTS) intervention on sanitation and hygiene in Pallisa district in Uganda. Quantitative data were collected from households using a semi-structured questionnaire and an observation checklist, entered and analyzed using univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analyses. Overall, knowledge on sanitation and hygiene was significantly higher (64.5%; 129/200) among households in the CLTS intervention than among those in the nonintervention subcounties (54.0%; 108/200) (P = 0.033). Latrine quality was rated as fair in a majority (73.3%; 143/195) of the CLTS intervention households compared with 50.8% (93/183) in the non-CLTS households (P < 0.001). Latrine cleanliness was rated as good in more than a half (51.3%; 100/195) of households in the intervention area, whereas only 13.7% (25/183) for the nonintervention area (P < 0.001). In this study, 35.0% (70/200) of the households in the intervention subcounty had attained open defecation-free (ODF) status compared with only 6.0% (12/200) in the nonintervention subcounty (P < 0.001). Level of knowledge on hygiene and sanitation (adjusted odd ratio [AOR]: 2.23; 95% CI: 1.24-4.03) and CLTS status (AOR: 8.89; 95% CI: 4.26-18.56) were significantly associated with achievement of ODF status in the multivariate analysis. The mean cases of diarrhea were significantly lower in CLTS implementing (subcounty (0.42 [SD ± 1.03]) than in the non-CLTS implementing subcounty (0.98 [SD ± 1.39]; t = -4.6; P < 0.001). Sanitation and hygiene outcomes were better in the CLTS intervention subcounty than in the non-CLTS intervention subcounty, suggesting that scaling up CLTS could reduce ODF and the burden of diarrheal diseases.

Narcissism has been negatively correlated with better ethical judgment. Intrinsic (I)--but not extrinsic--religiosity has been positively associated with better ethical judgment. We hypothesize that these relationships also hold for Christian church ministers. Therefore, this study of church ministers was undertaken to determine the effects of religiosity and narcissism on the ethical judgment of ministers confronted with 10 different ethical scenarios. To test our hypotheses, we surveyed 2,490 Protestant church ministers and received 488 usable surveys. Results indicated that intrinsic religiosity--but not extrinsic personal (Ep) or extrinsic social (Es) religiosity--had significant positive effects on ethical judgment, participants' confidence in their ethical judgment, and participants' willingness to forgive. Ep, in contrast, had significant negative effects on ethical judgment and willingness to forgive, while Es had a significant negative effect on confidence. Narcissism overall had a negative effect on ethical judgment and was found to interact with intrinsic religiosity such that the effects of narcissism were mitigated in the presence of high levels of intrinsic religiosity. ********** The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of narcissism and religiosity on ethical judgment among church ministers. A representative definition of narcissism is "an orientation toward seeking out self-enhancement experiences from the social environment to satiate need for admiration and recognition" (Roche, Pincus, Lukowitsky, Menard, & Conroy, 2013, p. 237). As indicated by this definition, research has focused primarily on social-personality (rather than diagnostic) incidences of narcissism and its effects within samples of specified communities (Ray & Ray, 1982). Even though the incidence of highly narcissistic individuals within a community may be relatively low, the disproportional havoc wreaked by individuals who place inordinate emphasis on satisfying their self-enhancement needs is well-documented (Goldman, 2009; Kets de Vries, 2006; Lubit, 2002). It is important to consider how narcissism affects the ethical behaviors of leadership and service personnel throughout society, especially as it pertains to those who are in church positions of leadership, authority, and service. Churches depend upon high ethical standards from staff and volunteer ministers who serve their congregations. Narcissism Mainstream research began to take note of narcissism with the publication of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Hall, 1979), which highlighted the principal components of narcissism as grandiosity, entitlement, dominance, and superiority (Corry, Merritt, Mrug, & Pamp, 2008). Recent conceptualizations of narcissism generally cluster around two versions of instance: (1) a dominant, high-functioning individual and (2) an individual characterized in terms of borderline personality (Miller & Campbell, 2008). The former conceptualization, used herein, has frequently been assessed in the literature using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Terry, 1988), which captures a social-personality construct of narcissism that also shares some of the trait behaviors (e.g., antagonism and grandiosity) associated with clinical diagnoses. As a result, the NPI more closely tracks a personality profile used by experts and researchers than, for example, the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire (PDQ-4+) used for clinical diagnosis (Miller & Campbell, 2008). Studies have consistently confirmed the negative effects of narcissism. Although narcissists often make good first impressions--exciting, visionary, and goal-oriented--colleagues tend to reverse their positive attributions over time (Paulhus, 1998). Narcissists often have difficulty getting along with others. Because they lack empathy and are often self-absorbed, they tend to be poor listeners and struggle to envision perspectives other than their own. …

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of essays on Dickens’s life and works yet published. It includes original articles on all of Dickens’s writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. Contributors speak in new ways about his depictions of families, the environmental degradation and improvements of the industrial age, the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. And his understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Landsport, Portsea, England. The second of 8 children, Dickens knew hunger and suffered as a child in debtors' prison. The chapter reprinted here fromDavid Copperfield (1849) reflects a period in Dickens' own life when he became a child laborer.

The debilitated old house in the city, wrapped in its mantle of soot, and leaning heavily on the crutches that had partaken of its decay and worn out with it, never knew a healthy or a cheerful interval, let what would betide. If the...

Thirty years ago, Marseilles* lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at...

How well I remember that New Year’s day [1860] when I met Mr. and Mrs. Lewes at the dinner-table of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Congreve! She was then at the age of forty, in the first outburst of her fame as the author of Adam Bede, and was just finishing the second volume of the Mill on the Floss. She had no friends at Wandsworth except Mr. and Mrs. Richard Congreve, who had made her acquaintance the year before.1 …

I wish to abstain from instituting any comparison, or drawing any parallel whatever, between the social features of the United States and those of the British Possessions in Canada. For this reason, I shall confine myself to a very brief account of our journeyings in the latter territory. But before I leave Niagara, I must advert to one disgusting circumstance which can hardly have escaped the observation of any decent traveller who has visited the Falls. On Table Rock, there is a cottage belonging to a Guide, where little relics of the place are sold, and where visitors register their names in a book kept for the purpose. On the wall of the room in which a great many of these volumes are preserved, the following request is posted: “Visitors will please not copy nor extract the remarks and poetical effusions from the registers and albums kept here.” But for this intimation, I should have let them lie upon the tables on which they were strewn with careful negligence, like books in a drawingroom : being quite satisfied with the stupendous silliness of certain stanzas with an anti-climax at the end of each, which were framed and hung up on the wall. Curious, however, after reading this announcement, to see what kind of morsels were so carefully preserved, I turned a few leaves, and found them scrawled all over with the vilest and the filthiest ribaldry that ever human hogs delighted in. It is humiliating enough to know that there are among men, brutes so obscene and worthless, that they can delight in laying their miserable profanations upon the very steps of Nature's greatest altar.

Mr. Tartar’s chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the best ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars. The floors were scrubbed to that extent, that you might have supposed the London blacks emancipated for ever, and gone out...

Tom Pinch and his sister having to part, for the dispatch of the morning’s business, immediately after the dispersion of the other actors in the scene upon the wharf with which the reader has been already made acquainted, had no opportunity of discussing the...

It was mid-day, and high water in the English port for which the Screw was bound, when, borne in gallantly upon the fulness of the tide, she let go her anchor in the river. Bright as the scene was; fresh, and full of motion; airy,...

“Hallo, Pecksniff!” cried Mr. Jonas from the parlour. “Isn’t somebody a going to open that precious old door of yours?” “Immediately, Mr. Jonas. Immediately.” “Ecod,” muttered the orphan, “not before it’s time neither. Whoever it is, has knocked three times, and each one...

The closing words of the last chapter, lead naturally to the commencement of this, its successor; for it has to do with a church. With the church so often mentioned heretofore, in which Tom Pinch played the organ for nothing. One sultry afternoon, about...

The best of architects and land surveyors kept a horse, in whom the enemies already mentioned more than once in these pages, pretended to detect a fanciful resemblance to his master. Not in his outward person, for he was a raw-boned, haggard horse, always...

The reverend septimus crisparkle (septimus, because six little brother crisparkles before him went out, one by one, as they were born, like six weak little rushlights, as they were lighted), having broken the thin morning ice near cloisterham weir with his amiable head, much...

Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun, and laughingly its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and danced, and peeping out in sport among the trees, plunged lightly down to hide themselves, as little Ruth and her companion...

There was a ghostly air about these uninhabited chambers in the Temple, and attending every circumstance of Tom’s employment there, which had a strange charm in it. Every morning when he shut his door at Islington, he turned his face towards an atmosphere of...

Martin began to work at the grammar-school next morning, with so much vigour and expedition, that Mr. Pinch had new reason to do homage to the natural endowments of that young gentleman, and to acknowledge his infinite superiority to himself. The new pupil received...

Ever since her last momentous conversation with her son, Mrs. Nickleby had begun to display unusual care in the adornment of her person, gradually superadding to those staid and matronly habiliments which had, up to that time, formed her ordinary attire, a variety of...

Ralph sat alone, in the solitary room where he was accus-tomed to take his meals, and to sit of nights when no profitable occupation called him abroad. Before him was an untasted breakfast, and near to where his fingers beat restlessly upon the table,...

There are some men who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless—even to themselves—a high...

The storm had long given place to a calm the most profound, X and the evening was pretty far advanced—indeed supper was over, and the process of digestion proceeding as favourably as, under the influence of complete tranquillity, cheerful conversation, and a moderate allowance...

Quite unconscious of the demonstrations of their amorous neighbour, or of their effects upon the susceptible bosom of her mama, Kate Nickleby had, by this time, begun to enjoy a settled feeling of tranquillity and happiness, to which, even in occasional and transitory glimpses,...

The new piece being a decided hit, was announced for every evening of performance until further notice, and the evenings when the theatre was closed, were reduced from three in the week to two. Nor were these the only tokens of extra-ordinary success; for,...

While Nicholas, absorbed in the one engrossing subject of interest which had recently opened upon him, occupied his leisure hours with thoughts of Madeline Bray, and in execution of the commissions which the anxiety of brother Charles in her behalf imposed upon him, saw...

It was a dark, wet, gloomy night in autumn, when in an upper room of a mean house situated in an obscure street or rather court near Lambeth, there sat, all alone, a one-eyed man grotesquely habited, either for lack of better garments or...

With that settled resolution, and steadiness of purpose to which extreme circumstances so often give birth, acting upon far less excitable and more sluggish temperaments than that which was the lot of Madeline Bray’s admirer, Nicholas started, at dawn of day, from the restless...

Nicholas was up betimes in the morning; but he had IN scarcely begun to dress, notwithstanding, when he heard footsteps ascending the stairs, and was presently saluted by the voices of Mr. Folair the pantomimist, and Mr. Lenville die tragedian. ‘House, house, house!’ cried Mr....

Having rendered his zealous assistance towards despatching the lunch, with all that promptitude and energy which are among the most important qualities that men of business can possess, Mr. Ralph Nickleby took a cordial farewell of his fellow speculators, and bent his steps westward...

There go the three-quarters past!’ muttered Newman Noggs, listening to the chimes of some neighbouring church,‘and my dinner time’s two. He does it on purpose. He makes a point of it. It’s just like him.’ It was in his own little den of an office...

‘London at last!’ cried Nicholas, throwing back his great-coat and rousing Smike from a long nap. ‘It seemed to me as though we should never reach it.’ ‘And yet you came along at a tidy pace too,’ observed the coachman, looking over his shoulder...

Often, while they were yet pacing the silent streets of the town on the morning of their departure, the child trembled with a mingled sensation of hope and fear as in some far-off figure imperfectly seen in the clear distance, her fancy traced a...

The ensuing morning brought reflection with it, as morning JL usually does; but widely different was the train of thought it awakened in the different persons who had been so unexpectedly brought together on the preceding evening, by the active agency of Messrs. Pyke...

Mr. MORTIMER LIGHTWOOD and Mr. Eugene Wrayburn took a coffee-house dinner together in Mr. Lightwood’s office. They had newly agreed to set up a joint establishment together. They had taken a bachelor cottage near Hampton, on the brink of the Thames, with a lawn,...

Adarkened and hushed room; the river outside the windows flowing on to the vast ocean; a figure on the bed, swathed and bandaged and bound, lying helpless on its back, with its two useless arms in splints at its sides. Only two days of...

Having assisted at a few more expositions of the lives of Misers, Mr. Venus became almost indispensable to the evenings at the Bower. The circumstance of having another listener to the wonders unfolded by Wegg, or, as it were, another calculator to cast up...

The winds and tides rose and fell a certain number of times, the earth moved round the sun a certain number of times, the ship upon the ocean made her voyage safely, and brought a baby Bella home. Then who so blest and happy...

Fascination FLEDGEBY, left alone in the counting-house, strolled about with his hat on one side, whistling, and investigating the drawers, and prying here and there for any small evidences of his being cheated, but could find none. ‘Not his merit that he don’t cheat...