Assessing the validity of a social history intervention to individuate nursing home residents

The purpose of the present study was to examine the efficacy of a social hi story intervention to individualize nursing home staff members' patient per ceptions in order to generate more positive altitudes toward target patient s, to foster more tolerant perceptions of those patients' problem behaviors , and to maximize staff members' perceived rewards of caregiving. Unlike pr evious studies that have demonstrated the effectiveness of such an interven tion in a hypothetical setting (M. E. Pietrukowicz & M. M. Johnson, 1991), the god of the current study was to assess the efficacy of this interventio n among actual patient-staff dyads in a nursing home care unit. Findings sh owed that the use of the social history intervention did not produce the pr edicted changes in staff perceptions and attitudes among a representative s ample of 42 staff members. Alternative explanations far the lack of signifi cant findings among this sample of nursing home staff such as employee burn out and attitudinal polarization, are presented, and suggestions for using this intervention successfully in other institutional settings are provided .