The response to challenging behaviour by care staff: emotional responses, attributions of cause and observations of practice.
Staff blame creates anger, but anger does not decide help—train feelings and actions separately.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Eisenhower et al. (2006) asked care staff how they view challenging behavior. The team used surveys and live observation. They wanted to know if staff beliefs cause negative feelings, and if those feelings shape helping actions.
Participants worked with adults who have intellectual disability. Researchers checked Weiner’s old idea: blame leads to anger, anger blocks help.
What they found
Staff who saw behavior as internal, stable and uncontrollable felt more anger and pity. Yet those feelings did not predict how willing they were to help.
When observers watched the same staff, real helping acts only weakly matched the survey answers. The neat blame-feeling-action chain broke apart.
How this fits with other research
Dagnan et al. (2005) ran a similar survey one year earlier. They also found the chain wobbly: high stress did not clearly feed into blame or help. Eisenhower et al. (2006) added live observation and still got weak links, building the null case.
Lambrechts et al. (2009) later showed the link flips by behavior type. Staff anger rose with self-injury but not with property damage, explaining why overall emotion scores failed to predict help in the 2006 data.
Cudré-Mauroux (2010) interviewed staff and found attributions shift over time as a coping tool. That dynamic view helps explain why a single survey snapshot in 2006 could not capture how staff decide to help.
Why it matters
Stop assuming a quick cognitive reframe will soften staff reactions. Target emotional regulation and coping first. Add live coaching so staff practice calm responses in real time. Measure help by what they do, not what they say they will do.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Previous studies have attempted to apply Weiner's attributional model of helping behaviour to care staff who work with service users with intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviours by using studies based on vignettes. The aims of the current study were to investigate the application of Weiner's model to 'real' service users with intellectual disabilities and challenging behaviours and to observe the care staff's actual responses to challenging behaviours displayed by service users. Also, to compare care staff attributions, emotions, optimism, willingness to help and observed helping behaviours for self-injurious behaviours in comparison to other forms of challenging behaviours. METHOD: A total of 27 care staff completed two sets of measures, one set regarding a self-injurious behaviour and the other regarding other forms of challenging behaviour. An additional 16 staff completed one set of measures. The measures focused on care staff attributions, emotions, optimism and willingness to help. Also, 16 of the care staff were observed interacting with the service users to collect data regarding their responses to challenging behaviours. RESULTS: For both self-injurious behaviours and other forms of challenging behaviour, associations were found between the care staff internal, stable and uncontrollable attribution scores and care staff negative emotion scores. However, no associations were found between the care staff levels of emotion, optimism and willingness to help. Some associations were found between the care staff levels of willingness to help and observed helping behaviours. There were significant differences between the care staff attribution scores with higher scores being obtained for uncontrollable and stable attributions for other forms of challenging behaviours. No significant differences were found between the care staff emotions, optimism, willingness to help and observed helping behaviours. CONCLUSIONS: The results did not provide support for Weiner's attributional model of helping behaviour. However, a preliminary model of negative care staff behaviour was derived from the exploratory analyses completed. This model proposes that there are associations between internal, stable and uncontrollable attributions and negative emotions in care staff and also between negative emotions and negative behaviours displayed by care staff in response to the actions of service users.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2006 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2005.00769.x