The Relation of Staff Consensus to Patient Disturbance on Mental Hospital Wards

It has been suggested that when a patient on a mental hospital ward becomes the object of covert disagreement among staff members, he will respond by an intensification of behavioral disturbance, and that this will subside only when the disagreement is exposed and resolved. This paper reports on an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American sociological review 1959-12, Vol.24 (6), p.829-835
Main Authors: Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rashkis, Harold A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anxiety
Behavior Problems
Group norms
Mental Patients
Nurses
Observational research
Paranoid behavior
Practitioner Patient Relationship
Psychiatric hospitals
Psychological attitudes
Term weighting
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Summary:It has been suggested that when a patient on a mental hospital ward becomes the object of covert disagreement among staff members, he will respond by an intensification of behavioral disturbance, and that this will subside only when the disagreement is exposed and resolved. This paper reports on an empirical investigation of this hypothesis, utilizing standard measures of disturbance and consensus. It was found that no significant relation could be demonstrated, for individual patients, between direction of change in staff consensus concerning patients and direction of change in their level of disturbance.
ISSN:0003-1224
DOI:10.2307/2088571