Street level bricolage : how individuals find pragmatic ways to care within the context of responding to behaviours of concern : the lived experience of staff working within domestic and forensic settings

Abstract

Individuals working in caring and supporting roles are required to respond to behaviours of concern. Various problem solving, diversionary and distractionary strategies can quickly and unexpectedly give way to a need for far more urgent and active interventions, up to an including the use of force or physical restraint. Such actions are widely castigated, with the currently national policy position requiring organisations to take steps to reduce, if not eliminate, their use. Whilst much research focuses on the strategies and approaches that underpin such reductions little is known about the dayto-day pragmatics of physical responses. Whilst it is recognised that complexity and uncertainty abound within events requiring staff intervention, little is known about how such situations are practically made sense of by staff. Staff from two different settings were recruited to explore their experiences. Four worked in a private dwelling as personal assistants funded to support a single person, and a further four from a large regional forensic inpatient service which catered to multiple individuals. Each was interviewed, and the findings analysed by drawing on IPA methodology (Smith et al., 2021, 2009). Individual Personal Experiential Themes were first identified, and then Group Experiential Themes compared. Street Level Bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980) combined with ‘Primary Task’ (Rice, 1963), and ‘Care Ethics’ (Gilligan, 1982) provided the conceptual tools to explore the experiences of participants, whilst ‘Bricolage’ (Levi-Strauss, 1962), ‘Mature Care’ (Pettersen, 2012), ‘SelfRegulation’ (Vohs & Baumeister, 2004) and ‘Resilience’ (APA, 2018) subsequently provided the means to describe the morally infused physical adaptivity which was found in both cohorts. The findings suggest that this is different to physical restraint as currently defined and widely understood. It was often personally authored and can be recognised as caring. This has implications for local policy development, training and practice leadership.

Date of Award	20 Feb 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University Of Strathclyde
Sponsors	University of Strathclyde
Supervisor	Laura Steckley (Supervisor) & Gillian MacIntyre (Supervisor)