An ecobehavioural perspective on the performance of direct care staff in facilities for people with learning difficulties

Direct care staff in residential services have most potential contact with clients. Therefore their behaviour is a key determinant of the quality of care. At a time of changing service structures, it is important to examine what staff actually do; both to address the impact of change on service quality, but also to explore whether the rhetoric concerning service reform is matched by the reality. The behavioural approach provides a research methodology for addressing staff behaviour and its impact on service quality. It is grounded in the observable and has a demonstrated utility in services for people with learning difficulties ranging from individual client programmes to service design. There has been concern that the application of the behavioural approach has been restricted to the examination of a narrow range of variables and that it has often involved instituting artificial conditions on natural environments which do not maintain beyond intervention periods. Contemporary behaviourism is moving towards greater ecological sensitivity, investigating relationships between behaviour and naturally occurring environmental conditions. This research took an ecobehavioural perspective of the work of direct care staff in community-based houses for people with learning difficulties. Five descriptive studies were carried out of staff behaviour in terms of their activity and the conditions in which their interactions with clients and with each other occurred. Following these, the use of staff interaction as a staff management variable was investigated. The intervention, in which staff discussed their work and client participation, was associated with a modest increase in client involvement in domestic activity. Qualitative data gathered contemporaneously enabled a more detailed evaluation to be made of the applicability of the intervention to the service setting. It is argued that qualitative data can contribute to the understanding of environment-intervention relationships, an important area for the continuing development of the ecobehavioural approach.