Assessment of anger coping skills in individuals with intellectual disabilities.
The PACS gives you a quick, stable way to measure anger-coping gains in adults with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hagopian et al. (2005) built a short carer scale called the Profile of Anger Coping Skills (PACS).
Adults with intellectual disability were rated before and after an anger-management program. No separate control group was used.
What they found
Carers gave stable scores when they repeated the PACS two weeks later. After treatment, the same carers saw large jumps in anger-coping skills.
How this fits with other research
The paper joins a family of ID checklists. Eisenmajer et al. (1998) launched the CCB for challenging behaviour, while Willemsen-Swinkels et al. (1998) gave us the Mini PAS-ADD for psychiatric symptoms. All three tools ask carers to tick boxes instead of needing a psychologist.
Unwin et al. (2014) later trimmed caregiver burden and quality of life into 16 items. Like PACS, they showed good reliability and linked their scores to aggression levels.
Dembo et al. (2023) did the same trick for independent-living skills with the 19-item AILMS. The pattern is clear: brief, reliable carer scales now exist for almost every adult-ID domain.
Why it matters
You can track anger-coping growth in real time without extra staff. Add the PACS to your intake packet and re-score every month. A rising number gives you an easy visual to share with carers and funders.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Recent controlled studies have supported the effectiveness of anger management training for people with intellectual disabilities (IDs). This report describes an evaluation instrument designed to assess their usage of specific anger coping skills. The Profile of Anger Coping Skills (PACS) is designed for completion by a staff member or carer. Three situations are first elicited in which a client frequently displays anger. The respondent then rates each situation for the extent to which the client deploys each of eight behavioural and cognitive coping skills. In a preliminary reliability study, 20 users of a day service for people with IDs were rated independently by two staff members, with one of them completing the assessment on two separate occasions: the PACS showed good test-retest reliability and lower, but still acceptable, interrater reliability. The PACS was subsequently used, in a different day service, as part of the assessment pack administered before and after a 12-week anger management group, with a parallel assessment of an untreated control group. The treated group showed substantial decreases in measures of anger, which were maintained at 6-month follow-up. Increases in PACS-rated anger coping skills were also seen in all participants in the anger management group, but not in the control group. There were differences in the extent to which different coping skills were acquired by the treated group, and there were also individual differences in the profile of specific skills acquired. It is concluded that the PACS is a reliable instrument for assessing anger coping skills, particularly when used repeatedly with the same informant. It provides information that is useful for both individual care planning and the design of future anger management programmes.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2005 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2005.00668.x