UvA

The present study examined the relation between the attitude towards aggression and the behavioural interventions of direct support staff responding to challenging behaviour in people with intellectual disabilities. A total of 121 professionals (from 20 direct support teams) participated in this study. The direct support context had a relatively large effect on the behavioural responses to aggression by direct support staff. For providing personal space and behavioural boundary-setting as well as restricting freedom, the effect of the direct support context (characteristics of the team or residential setting) was three times larger than the effect of individual support staff characteristics (i.e., years of work experience, education, position, gender and age). The direct support context accounted for a large 66% of the variance in using coercive measures, whereas individual support staff characteristics only accounted for 8% of the variance. A negative attitude towards aggression of the direct support team proved to be a substantially more powerful predictor of applying coercive measures than the negative attitude of direct support professionals within teams.