Staff in services for people with intellectual disabilities: the impact of stress on attributions of challenging behaviour.
High stress does not travel through staff attributions to change helping behavior in ID residential care.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Dagnan et al. (2005) asked residential staff about stress, burnout, and the reasons they give for client challenging behavior.
They used a survey to test Weiner’s model. The model says stress should shape staff attributions, which should shape helping responses.
What they found
Stress and burnout were high, but they did not lead to the attributions or helping moves the model predicted.
The links were weak or missing, so the study could not fully support Weiner’s chain.
How this fits with other research
Eisenhower et al. (2006) ran a near-copy survey one year later and got the same blank result: attributions predicted anger, yet anger did not predict willingness to help. This back-to-back replication shows the model truly stalls with ID staff.
Cudré-Mauroux (2010) went deeper with interviews and found staff attributions shift over time and serve as coping tools. This extends the 2005 picture by showing attributions are fluid, not fixed causes.
Kurz et al. (2014) swapped attributions for psychological inflexibility and found it clearly mediates stress and distress. Their result suggests we may need to target flexibility, not causal beliefs, to protect staff.
Why it matters
If you supervise residential staff, do not assume teaching them to re-label behavior will lower burnout or boost helpful reactions. The chain is broken. Instead, measure psychological inflexibility and add brief ACT-based exercises. These show stronger ties to stress reduction than attribution training alone.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: There is a lack of a conceptual framework as to how stress and attribution variables interact and influence staff behaviour in response to challenging behaviour. To address this, a model is tested examining the impact of stress on attributions of challenging behaviour within Weiner's model of helping. METHOD: A total of 107 staff working in community homes for people with intellectual disabilities completed a self-report questionnaire that measured stress, burnout, attributions, emotions, optimism and helping behaviour in response to challenging behaviour. RESULTS: Partial support was found for the role of attributions and emotions. However, although staff reported high stress levels and moderate burnout, this did not appear to relate to their reporting of thoughts and feelings regarding challenging behaviour predicted by Weiner's helping model. It was not possible to fully test the helping model, as the 'help' variable was not normally distributed. CONCLUSIONS: There was little evidence to suggest that stress has a primary role in determining staff responses when examined within Weiner's model of helping. Limited support in general was offered for Weiner's helping model. Potential conceptual difficulties and clinical implications are explored and alternative models for future research are discussed.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2005 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2005.00758.x