RULES OF ENGAGEMENT - TOWARD AN ANALYSIS OF STAFF RESPONSES TO CHALLENGING BEHAVIOR

Through observational analysis, the actions of care staff have frequen tly been identified as sources of socially mediated reinforcement capa ble of developing and maintaining challenging behavior. Accordingly, b ehavioral interventions have often sought to train care staff as behav ioral change agents. As yet, however, there have been few attempts to conduct full functional analyses of the behavior of care staff working with people with mental retardation and challenging behaviors. We arg ue that although direct contingency-shaping of staff behavior has righ tly been emphasized, it is possible that many aspects of staff conduct are under the indirect control of verbal formulations. If staff behav ior is rule-governed (Skinner 1969), a range of different sources of c ontrol must be considered in a complete analysis. Using this framework , we interpret existing literature on staff behavior and identify rese arch strategies that will extend our understanding of why staff act as they do.