Staff judgements of responsibility for the challenging behaviour of adults with intellectual disabilities.
Teach staff to see clients as partners in fixing aggression, not villains who cause it, and helping effort rises.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Dagnan et al. (2005) asked staff how much blame they place on adults with intellectual disability when those adults show aggression.
The team used a short survey. Workers read a short story about a client hitting someone. Then they rated who caused the problem and who should fix it.
What they found
Staff who said "the client did not cause the blow-up, but the client can help end it" felt more sympathy and said they would give more help.
In plain words, when workers drop blame and keep hope, they try harder.
How this fits with other research
Saville et al. (2002) tried the same idea earlier but found no clear link. The difference: K et al. asked about real versus made-up aggression. Real anger stirred stronger feelings and muddied the blame picture.
Flynn et al. (2018) looked at actual exposure to aggression and saw almost no tie to staff burnout. Their data say workplace climate matters more than incident counts. D et al. add the missing piece: staff views, not raw exposure, drive helping effort.
van den Hazel et al. (2009) show another layer of staff bias. When a client carries a personality disorder label, staff expect longer, harsher treatment. Pair that with D et al. and you see a pattern: what staff believe inside shapes what clients get outside.
Why it matters
You can shift staff effort without waiting for new tools or meds. Brief training that frames aggression as "no one’s fault, but everyone’s puzzle to solve" raises sympathy and keeps helpers engaged. Add role-play of real incidents, as K et al. hint, so workers practice the new view under heat.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Open your next staff meeting with a five-minute vignette: ask the team to list what the client can do to calm the next episode, not why the client started it.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: This study examines the importance of staff judgements of responsibility for challenging behaviour in predicting their emotional and intended helping responses. METHODS: Sixty-two carers completed questionnaires rating attributions of internality, stability and controllability, emotions of sympathy and anger, judgements of responsibility for the development of challenging behaviour and for its resolution and intended effort in helping in response to a scenario describing an aggressive behaviour. RESULTS: Results showed significant correlations between judgements of responsibility and attributions, emotions and intended effort in helping. Regression analysis showed that the best predictor of intended helping is the emotion of sympathy and that sympathy is best predicted by the attribution of internality, the judgement that people are not responsible for the development of challenging behaviour and the judgement that they are responsible for the resolution of the behaviour. CONCLUSIONS: Judgements of responsibility predict emotional and intended behavioural responses of carers of people with intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviour. The results are discussed in relation to previous work on carer attributions in response to challenging behaviour. Implications for clinical work with carers are considered.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2005 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2005.00665.x