The role of support staff in promoting the social inclusion of persons with an intellectual disability.
Support staff rank care tasks above social inclusion, but autonomy-supportive practices can flip this pattern.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The researchers asked 245 support staff to rank daily tasks. They compared care tasks like feeding and hygiene against social inclusion tasks like helping clients make friends.
Staff worked in three settings: day centres, supported living, and residential homes. The survey took place in the UK.
What they found
In every setting, staff rated care tasks as more important than social inclusion tasks. The gap was biggest in day centres and smallest in supported living.
Even in the best setting, social inclusion still came second.
How this fits with other research
Finke et al. (2017) found similar burnout and weak team vision among UK community staff. This helps explain why social inclusion drops down the priority list.
Perry et al. (2024) shows the opposite pattern. When staff give clients real choices, clients feel more autonomous and motivated. This creates an apparent contradiction: staff say inclusion matters less, yet when they do support autonomy, clients thrive. The difference is methods explains it. The 2010 survey asked staff to rank tasks. The 2024 study watched what actually happened when staff used autonomy support.
Vassos et al. (2016) reviewed Person-Centred Planning and found modest gains in community participation. This aligns with the 2010 finding that supported living staff already rank inclusion higher than day centre staff.
Why it matters
Your staff will likely put care first unless you build systems that make inclusion automatic. Add social goals to daily task lists. Use N et al.'s autonomy support tactics: offer choices, give brief rationales, and ask for client input. These small shifts can close the priority gap without extra hours.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add one social-inclusion target to each client's daily data sheet and prompt staff to offer two choices during every routine care task.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Past studies have found that people supported in more individualised housing options tend to have levels of community participation and wider social networks than those in other accommodation options. Yet, the contribution of support staff in facilitating social inclusion has received relatively scant attention. METHODS: In all 245 staff working in either supported living schemes, or shared residential and group homes, or in day centres completed a written questionnaire in which they rated in terms of priority to their job, 16 tasks that were supportive of social inclusion and a further 16 tasks that related to the care of the person they supported. In addition staff identified those tasks that they considered were not appropriate to their job. RESULTS: Across all three service settings, staff rated more care tasks as having higher priority than they did the social inclusion tasks. However, staff in supported living schemes rated more social inclusion tasks as having high priority than did staff in the other two service settings. Equally the staff who were most inclined to rate social inclusion tasks as not being applicable to their job were those working day centres; female rather than male staff, those in front-line staff rather than senior staff, and those in part-time or relief positions rather than full-time posts. However, within each service settings, there were wide variations in how staff rated the social inclusion tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Staff working in more individualised support arrangements tend to give greater priority to promoting social inclusion although this can vary widely both across and within staff teams. Nonetheless, staff gave greater priority to care tasks especially in congregated service settings. Service managers may need to give more emphasis to social inclusion tasks and provide the leadership, training and resources to facilitate support staff to re-assess their priorities.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2010 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2010.01295.x