Staff's attitudes and reactions towards aggressive behaviour of clients with intellectual disabilities: a multi-level study.
Team attitudes toward aggression drive coercive interventions more than any single staff member's traits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The researchers asked 121 staff how they feel about client aggression.
They also asked what the whole team thinks.
Then they checked which answers best predicted when staff used coercive methods like restraint.
What they found
Team-level attitudes mattered more than any single staff member's traits.
If the whole team saw aggression as scary or bad, they reached for coercive tools faster.
Individual training history or personal feelings added little extra power.
How this fits with other research
Perez et al. (2015) already showed that a short BST package can lift staff emotional intelligence in ID homes.
That study trained people one by one. H et al. now says train the whole team instead.
Locke et al. (2019) found the same pattern in autism schools: peer climate beat individual traits for predicting fidelity.
Kowalski et al. (2010) adds that heavy workload and low decision power fuel burnout. Together these papers say: fix the system, not just the person.
Why it matters
Stop sending lone staff to yet another de-escalation workshop. Gather the whole shift for a brief team huddle. Ask, "How do we all view aggression here?" Then reshape that shared view together.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Data were collected from 121 staff members (20 direct support staff teams) on background characteristics of the individual staff members and their teams (gender, age, years of work experience, position and education), the frequency and form of aggression of clients with an intellectual disability (verbal or physical), staff members' attitudes towards aggression, and the types of behavioural interventions they executed (providing personal space and behavioural boundary-setting, restricting freedom and the use of coercive measures). Additionally, client group characteristics (age of clients, type of care and client's level of intellectual disability) were assessed. Multilevel analyses (individual and contextual level) were performed to examine the relations between all studied variables and the behavioural interventions. The results showed that for providing personal space and behavioural boundary-setting as well as for restricting freedom, the proportion of variance explained by the context (staff team and client group characteristics) was three times larger than the proportion of variance explained by individual staff member characteristics. For using coercive measures, the context even accounted for 66% of the variance, whereas only 8% was explained by individual staff member characteristics. A negative attitude towards aggression of the direct support team as a whole proved to be an especially strong predictor of using coercive measures. To diminish the use of coercive measures, interventions should therefore be directed towards influencing the attitude of direct support teams instead of individual staff members.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.01.032