How to Study Interactions between Challenging Behaviour and Space? Exploring the Relevance of Routinely Collected Data

Aim. This study aims to identify ways that allow studying how intellectually impaired persons showing challenging behaviour interact with space, without impacting their daily lives. Back-ground. Research about space that better suits these persons’ needs is challenging to conduct, since they may have difficulties expressing themselves verbally and are extremely sensitive to-wards sensory stimuli. Therefore, researchers collecting data may be disturbing and intrusive, and requires great caution. Tapping into existing data may be a promising alternative. Residential care organisations routinely collect data about residents during their regular work processes, such as personal information and incident registration. Also useful may be routinely collected spatial data, such as drawings and repair reports. This study explores how routinely collected data (RCD) can provide insight into how residents interact with space, without impacting their daily lives.
Methods. We reflect on the possibilities of using RCD (related to resident or space) based on explorations in the context of a case study at a Dutch very-intensive-care facility. The data were analysed to identify general patterns, such as locations with a high density of incidents/repairs and verified initial findings by member checking with staff. Results. The RCD analysed provide a basic and relevant insight into incidents and repairs connected to challenging behaviour. However, most data were neither complete or relevant for analysis. Therefore, we dis-cussed the RCD were with staff and only then it was possible to draw conclusions regarding relevance of RCD and the residents-space interactions.
Conclusions. Only in conjunction with an ex-tended approach on member checking the use of RCD seems relevant. RCD have little meaning of their own. But the combination of RCD with member checking seems to provide insight into the interaction between residents and space, without interfering with the residents’ daily lives.