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The relation of staff knowledge of behavioral principles to ratings of treatment acceptability for interventions used in the management of self-injurious behavior (SIB) was examined with 57 direct-care staff members from an ICF/MR. Case descriptions of an adult with severe mental retardation who exhibited SIB were presented, followed by descriptions of six behavioral interventions rated on acceptability. Subjects also completed a 25-item measure of general knowledge of behavioral principles. Results indicated that staff age and educational attainment but not treatment acceptability ratings were significantly related to knowledge scores. Implications of the findings were discussed.

Viewed from a behavior analytic perspective as a form of verbal behavior, regulatory rules affect the behavior of service providers in residential programs directly and indirectly; they can facilitate habilitative services or exert a powerful counter-habilitative influence. Because regulations are written to apply to the general case, regulatory rules tend to become decontextualized, often failing to address (a) the needs of individuals and (b) specific environmental circumstances. Ecobehavioral analysis of rule-governed behavior in residential settings can provide a means of understanding and measuring the effects of regulatory rules. Feedback from field settings about the effects of regulatory rules on the behavior of people who live and work in residential settings would help to recontextualize the rule-making process and promote better correspondence between the intended effects of regulations and their actual effects.

The conflict between those who view aversive therapeutic interventions from an ideological perspective and those who view them from a scientific perspective was examined. Special attention was devoted to the most detailed review of punishment procedures in mental retardation that has been written from an ideological perspective, a monograph published by The Association for Persons With Severe Handicaps (Guess, Helmstetter, Turnbull, & Knowlton, 1986). The monograph was found to suffer from a number of serious conceptual and methodological flaws that militate against accepting its conclusions as bases for research and social policy in mental retardation. The conclusion was drawn that some of those who reject aversive therapeutic interventions do so out of a poor understanding of behavioral science and a primarily ideological frame of reference.

Using a case description methodology, Tarnowski, Rasnake, Mulick, and Kelly (1989) examined the effects of behavior problem severity and intervention type on staff ratings of six behavioral interventions used to treat self-injurious behavior (SIB). Results indicated that accelerative interventions were judged more acceptable than reductive treatments, and acceptability of treatments varied as a function of SIB severity. We hypothesized that judgments of treatment acceptability might vary as a function of specific institutional characteristics and conducted a replication of the previous study in a setting where the institutional treatment philosophy was explicitly behavioral. Results indicated that (a) accelerative interventions were preferred to reductive treatments, (b) acceptability ratings were not significantly influenced by SIB severity, and (c) interventions were generally found to be more acceptable by staff working in a behavioral treatment milieu.

Different levels of influence result in contingencies of reinforcement that can affect the behavior of staff members and residents in facilities for people with mental retardation. Although the intent of any residential facility is surely habilitation, some types of influence result in contingencies of reinforcement that do not promote adaptive behavior by residents, that is, are counter-habilitative. Some of the conceptual issues involved in understanding the operation of these contingencies in complex caregiving environments were discussed. Preliminary data gathered from one highly specialized residential facility were used to illustrate the influence of social, ecological, and regulatory contingencies that could have a counter-habilitative impact on residents. We concluded that a close examination of all levels of influence affecting institutions, their staff, and residents will be necessary if better progress is to be made towards adequately serving the needs of people who live in institutional settings.

Using a case description methodology, we examined the effects of behavior problem severity, intervention type (accelerative vs. reductive), client status (child vs. adult), and type of work setting (child vs. adult unit) on staff members' acceptability ratings of six behavioral interventions used to treat self-injurious behavior (SIB). Results indicated that (a) accelerative interventions were rated more acceptable than reductive treatments, (b) acceptability of treatments varied as a function of SIB severity, and (c) client status and type of work setting failed to significantly influence acceptability ratings. Findings were discussed in the context of the current controversy surrounding the use of aversive treatments. The implications of the results for the design of institutionally based behavioral intervention programs were examined.

An updated version of a 9-item questionnaire concerning misconceptions about mental retardation originally developed by Winthrop and Taylor (1956) was administered to a total of 558 individuals from heterogenous samples. The relations of the demographic, experimental, and contact characteristics of the respondents in the 1986 sample to their misconceptions score were explored as were differences in the distributions of the percentages of endorsements of the nine misconceptions for the samples in 1956 and 1986.