Abstract
Six psychiatry inpatients were observed during mealtimes to determine and evaluate staff intervention techniques. To extend and further elaborate the findings of a previous work (Pines, Kupst, Natta, & Schulman, 1985), staff behaviors (positive, punitive, isolating, and neutral) were investigated for their potential relationship to subsequent child behaviors (positive, negative, and inactive) via a lag sequential analytic approach. Staff punitive and isolating behaviors tended to be associated with significant increases in the likelihood of subsequent child negative behaviors and with significant decreases in child positive behaviors. Staff positive behaviors tended not to be related to a subsequent increase or decrease in any of the coded child behaviors. Findings demonstrate the utility of assessing conditional probabilities of sequences of staff-child behaviors in psychiatric inpatients.
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Thanks are due to Margery Johnson, M.D., and the staff of the Child Psychiatry Inpatient Unit, and especially to the IPU research team: Karen Geary, Patricia Kennedy, John Lutz, Joyce Weishaar, Gary Westman, and Caryl Zaar. We are also grateful to Bernardine Van Dygriff for help in preparing the manuscript, and to the Margaret Etter Creche Learning Center for their support of this project.
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Natta, M.B., Holmbeck, G.N., Kupst, M.J. et al. Sequences of staff-child interactions on a psychiatric inpatient unit. J Abnorm Child Psychol 18, 1–14 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00919452
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00919452