Making sense of behaviour: a Q study to elicit the viewpoints of educationalists who work with children and young people with challenging behaviour.

Abstract

The majority of research, relating to the ways in which school staff interpret the behaviour of children and young people, adopts a narrow focus on attributional styles. Other existing research seeks to measure attitudes associated with context specific or hypothetical information, in order to infer perceptions of cause and effect relationships regarding the ways in which the behaviour of children and young people comes about. To the researcher’s knowledge, there have been no attempts to date to explore the complexities relating to the multifaceted views of school staff, in terms of making sense of the behaviour of children and young people. In addition, there is a dearth of research which integrates wide-ranging aspects of the lives of children and young people which are considered to be important by those who make sense of their behaviour. The current research employs Q methodology to investigate the ways in which 21 members of staff, working within five Local Authority funded provisions, rank 67 statements according to their importance. Statements represented issues or ideas considered to be important in terms of understanding the behaviour of children and young people. Participants work with children and young people who exhibit the most challenging behaviour within the Borough. Q analysis yielded a three factor solution and factor interpretations were constructed, based on the empirically detected areas of convergence and divergence and data from semi structured interviews with a subset of participants. Field notes were also used to facilitate the interpretive process. The emergent social perspectives are discussed in terms of the roles of; parents and the home, school staff and children and young people themselves.