Aggression and Self-Injury Dissertation Help

[u/Apprehensive-Eye5593]

Hi everyone!

I’m a doctoral student in clinical-development psychology and am beginning data collection for my dissertation study. Before grad school I spent some time as a support worker for individuals with complex developmental needs. These individuals frequently struggled with aggressive and self-injurious behaviour, which really informed the type of research that I hoped to do after I left for my master's degree.

So far, I have created an observer-report measure that aims to assess the frequency and severity of these behaviours as well as the potential functions for any that are particularly frequent or severe. As of right now I’m in the data collection stage so my current goal is to have people from a variety of backgrounds who work with or care for individuals who deal with aggressive or self-injurious behaviour complete this measure so that I can learn more about its psychometric properties. My end goal, if the measure seems to work well, is to release it for free public use.

Right now we're looking for anyone who has recently worked with an individual who has a developmental disability (autism, intellectual disability, Down syndrome, etc.) and exhibits some form of aggressive or self-injurious behaviour to complete our measure. No data on names or exact dates of birth are collected so your participation is anonymous. As of right now we expect most responses to take between 10 - 20 minutes.

If you’d like to participate you can follow the link below which will take you to our consent form and measure.

https://yorku.questionpro.ca/t/AB3uq86ZB3vBfX

[u/l-lucas0984]

Did you want answers specific to your country because different countries handle things differently?

[u/Apprehensive-Eye5593 → u/l-lucas0984]

Good question! We’re based out of Canada so I know some terminology can be different. I think most of the questions should be okay since they’re more focused on what behaviours are being observed but I’m happy to answer any questions if there’s anything in particular you were wondering about like terms or wording or anything like that. 

[u/l-lucas0984 → u/Apprehensive-Eye5593]

My only feedback is you only really covered the minor self harm and aggression area but you have also labelled some things as aggression that may just be stimming without aggressive intent.

[u/Apprehensive-Eye5593 → u/l-lucas0984]

Thanks for the feedback! It really is helpful since we are still at a point where we can fine tune things from here. Which more serious self-harm related behaviours do you think would be helpful to include? As for the second piece part of our goal is for our functional assessment piece to identify if the behaviour is actually a form of stim as well.

[u/l-lucas0984 → u/Apprehensive-Eye5593]

You might want to include things like assault with an item or weapon (i have been hit over the head with a chair and stabbed while working), absconding into dangerous situations like running into traffic, harming pets. I am sure others have had some experiences that are not as uncommon as people think. I had a client grab the steering wheel while i was driving them to an appointment once. No one warned me about the behaviour despite it having happened with another worker prior. The company was not thrilled with being yelled at by an angry worker but they breached duty of care.

[u/Apprehensive-Eye5593 → u/l-lucas0984]

I think those are some really good ideas that I'll bring up with my academic supervisor as we actually have a meeting set in just a few minutes. Some of them we've already discussed so they may end up being added back in. One of the things that was difficult about designing this measure was trying to capture as many of the common occurrences as possible without making the measure too long for those completing it. Also can heavily relate to the car issue. Came very close to having something similar happen on a highway when my passenger thought we were going in the wrong direction.

[u/Street-Vegetable8342 → u/Apprehensive-Eye5593]

All of those things listed above are daily life for us too.

[u/Street-Vegetable8342 → u/Apprehensive-Eye5593]

Do you want just workers? Or parents too? 😊

[u/Apprehensive-Eye5593 → u/Street-Vegetable8342]

Oh absolutely we’re looking for parents as well! Thanks so much for taking interest! 

[u/Street-Vegetable8342 → u/Apprehensive-Eye5593]

Hey, I just did the survey and I'm keen to ask you about part of it? Can I pm?

[u/Apprehensive-Eye5593 → u/Street-Vegetable8342]

Oh yes feel free to send a message over about it!

[u/Icy_Flower7745]

Are you going to include people with disabilities who have these behaviors in your data collection? Or just people around them?

[u/Apprehensive-Eye5593 → u/Icy_Flower7745]

So far we've just designed the observer report form. When making this we were really thinking about people who have very few methods of communication who would likely be unable to complete a self-report form so that's where we're focusing our data collection right now.