Bench-Marking Effects in the Blaming of Professionals for Incidents of Aggression and Assault

Issue title: Industrial Rehabilitation

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Carifio, James | Lanza, Marilyn

Affiliations: University of Massachusetts at Lowell | Edith Nourse Rogers Veterans Hospital, Bedford, Massachusetts

Abstract: This study compared all possible orders of responding to three vignettes describing incidents between a male patient and a female nurse in which the nurse is mildly assaulted, severely assaulted, or verbally abused by the patient (the control condition). Subjects were 32 female senior-year nursing students and 28 practicing nurses. It was found that response levels to a given vignette could predict a respondent's response to the other vignettes. Also, a significant “bench-marking” effect was found: if a subject responded to the mild assault vignette first, the subject's overall response pattern best fit the general nonlinear assignment-of-blame pattern observed, but if the subject responded to the severe assault or control vignette first, this vignette set a bench mark for responding from which the subject's subsequent responses did not deviate greatly, which slightly distorted the subject's V-shaped nonlinear response pattern.

Keywords: Assault, Violence, Simulations, Nonlinear relationships, Predictive validity

DOI: 10.3233/WOR-1994-4108

Journal: Work, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 56-67, 1994