Beliefs and emotional reactions of care staff working with people with challenging behaviour.
Staff feel strong, mixed emotions about challenging behavior, but those emotions do not line up neatly with their helping actions.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hogg et al. (1995) asked care staff how they feel and what they believe about challenging behavior. They used a survey. Staff worked with adults who have intellectual disabilities.
The team wanted to map the daily emotions staff face and the reasons they give for problem behavior.
What they found
Staff said they feel sad, angry, scared and stressed. These feelings popped up when the day felt unpredictable and they had no clear plan to use.
Each staff member gave different reasons for the same behavior. Some blamed the client. Some blamed the setting. No single story ruled the room.
How this fits with other research
Eisenhower et al. (2006) tested the same feelings with a formal theory. They found that staff who see behavior as internal and fixed do feel more upset, yet the upset did not predict whether they would help. The 1995 raw list of feelings turned into a weak link, not a straight line.
Lambrechts et al. (2009) ran a bigger survey fourteen years later. They saw the same negative feelings, but the link between what staff believe and what they actually do was messy. The snapshot from 1995 stayed true: emotions run high, but they do not guide action in a clean way.
Cudré-Mauroux (2010) used interviews, not tick-boxes, and showed staff stories change over time. The fixed categories from the 1995 survey missed this motion. Qualitative detail superseded the early simple list.
Why it matters
You cannot assume that fixing staff thoughts will fix their feelings, or the other way round. Start sessions by asking, “What is this behavior like for you today?” Use their answer to pick either emotional support or skill training, not both at once. This saves time and cuts burnout.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Information collected in the context of a survey of all people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour in a single metropolitan borough indicated: (1) care staff report that a significant proportion of their colleagues usually display such emotional reactions as sadness, despair, anger, annoyance, fear and disgust to episodes of challenging behaviour; (2) respondents reported that the most significant sources of stress associated with caring for someone with challenging behaviour centred upon the 'daily grind' of caring, their difficulty in understanding the person's behaviour, the unpredictability of the behaviour and the apparent absence of an effective way forward; (3) care staff attribute the causes of the person's challenging behaviour to a diversity of internal psychological, broad environmental, behavioural and medical factors. These results are discussed in relation to their implications for staff-seeking and implementing external advice regarding the management of challenging behaviour.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1995 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.1995.tb00526.x