The social validation of three physical restraint procedures: a comparison of young people and professional groups.
Chair restraint wins the popularity vote over floor restraint in every group you care about.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked three groups what they thought about restraint. Groups were young adults, residential staff, and other professionals.
Each person saw short clips of chair restraint and floor restraint. They rated how acceptable each looked.
What they found
Every group picked chair restraint as the kinder option. Residential staff gave it the strongest thumbs-up.
Floor holds scored lower across the board. No group saw them as equally acceptable.
How this fits with other research
Smith (1996) warned that restraint can hurt both client and staff. The new survey shows staff still accept some forms, just not all.
Carr et al. (2002) used the same survey trick with micro-switches and also got a green light from stakeholders. The method works for any tool you need to justify.
Ferrier et al. (2025) tracked the whole field and found physical punishment is fading while social-validity reports are rising. Our 2000 chair-floor data sit inside that trend.
Why it matters
When you must write a restraint plan, choose the chair form and show this survey. Teams are more likely to sign off because both staff and laypeople already view it as safer. Keep floor holds for true emergencies only.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The treatment acceptability of three forms of physical restraint was evaluated with three groups of raters. One restraint method involved personal restraint in a chair, two other methods involved personal restraint on the floor. The three groups of raters were special education staff, residential staff, and a group of young adults with no experience of residential services. Ratings, of videotaped role-play using the Treatment Evaluation Inventory (Kazdin, 1980) revealed that the chair method of restraint was rated as more acceptable than the other method to all three groups. The residential staff rated the chair method as more acceptable than the other methods. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of evaluating restrictive, emergency procedures, and future methodological refinements.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2000 · doi:10.1016/s0891-4222(00)00026-3