PhD Position: De-escalation

Aggression in residential treatment settings remains a significant challenge for care professionals. An aggressive incident involving a client is not solely determined by what occurs in the moment but should be understood as the outcome of a complex interplay of factors. In this regard, characteristics of care professionals play an important role in these interacting processes, including psychophysiological indicators of wellbeing, such as insufficient sleep, cumulative stress and limited recovery, as well as previous experiences with incidents and the broader team, managerial and ward contexts.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of wearable technologies, such as smartwatches and biosensors that continuously measure psychophysiological signals, to better capture these dynamic processes. Such technologies may offer new opportunities to gain insight into the interaction between psychophysiological states and behaviour, and could potentially contribute to de-escalation efforts, the prevention of incidents and the reduction of coercive measures. At the same time, the use of wearables in residential and other high-risk care settings raises important ethical and practical questions.

The main question of this PhD-project is how psychophysiological states and stress responses influence staff wellbeing and behaviour, escalation/de-escalation, and the possible use of coercive measures. Before interacting with clients, staff may differ in their physiological starting point due to sleep problems, recovery, chronic stress or earlier experiences during a shift. During escalation, these states may affect perception, self-regulation, and behavioural responses towards clients. After incidents, recovery patterns and stress accumulation may shape future functioning and future interactions. The project pays particular attention to how psychophysiological vulnerability – or psychophysiological resilience – prior to an incident may shape the likelihood of escalation, the use of coercive practices and the quality of relational care.

This PhD project is part of the larger consortium project 'De-escalating Aggressive Encounters between Frontline Workers and Citizens' and is embedded in Work package 2 (WP2), which investigates frontline workers' psyfofysiology and subjective experience. The present PhD project focuses primarily on staff members in residential treatment clinics for young people and adults with and without mild intellectual disabilities and provides the in-depth health care and forensic perspective within a cross-sector design that also covers law enforcement, public transport and retail. The mechanisms which are investigated (vulnerability, motives for aggression, coercion and ethics of monitoring) are examined in depth within residential care and, where relevant, compared across sectors, feeding the project's cross-sector synthesis and perspective on increasing stress before, during, and after aggressive interactions between staff and clients. The consortium brings together expertise from criminology, clinical and forensic psychology, sociology, behavioural science, ethics and data science, and combines video-based research, psychophysiology, qualitative methods and intervention development.

Within WP2, four complementary PhD projects share one dataset while each takes a distinct lens. The project’s distinctive contribution is the in-depth psychophysiological and ethical perspective on care staff: physiological vulnerability and resilience (sleep, recovery, cumulative stress), coercion and the responsible use of monitoring in high-risk care. Your measurements will be collected using the shared WP2 protocol and codebook and linked to behaviourally coded video (WP1) and to workers’ subjective experience, so that a dedicated integration project can later combine the modalities.

The project may include a combination of wearable measurements, incident-related assessments, qualitative interviews or focus groups, and practice-based ethical analysis. A key aim is to understand to what extend wearable-based monitoring can support timely reflection, better allocation of support staff and improved decision-making around high-risk interactions. There is room for both quantitative and qualitative work. Optional attention may be given to team- or ward-level processes, such as shared stress patterns or team synchrony, where feasible and relevant.

The ethical component of the PhD project is not intended as a purely theoretical exercise, but as a practical ethics line closely connected to real dilemmas in clinical settings. This may involve the development of one or more ethical case studies, supported by qualitative interviews or focus groups with staff, team leaders and other stakeholders. Topics may include voluntariness, privacy, data sharing, professional autonomy, managerial use of physiological information and the relational implications of monitoring in care settings. Because these questions arise wherever wearables and video are used across the project, this line also contributes to a shared framework for responsible use for WP2 as a whole. The goal is not only to identify ethical concerns, but also to contribute to a grounded framework for responsible implementation.

Key questions for you to work on include:

• How do sleep, stress and physiological recovery in the context of an aggressive incident influence staff wellbeing and behaviour?
• What psychophysiological patterns are associated with de-escalating and escalating staff responses?
• What happens to staff after aggressive incidents in terms of recovery, stress accumulation and future functioning?
• Can wearable-based monitoring contribute to better timing, support and reflection around situations involving imminent coercion?
• Under what conditions might wearable technology contribute to the reduction of coercion, and when might it create new ethical concerns?
• What practical ethical dilemmas arise when physiological data are used in clinical teams or on wards?
• Which of these mechanisms are specific to residential care, and which are shared with other frontline sectors?

You will work closely with the other consortium partners and treatment organisations and will be expected to visit Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam approximately once a month. This PhD project offers the opportunity to work at the intersection of psychophysiology, staff support, team functioning, coercion reduction, and responsible innovation in clinical practice. You will design and conduct empirical studies in close collaboration with treatment organisations.

This PhD position, carries a 10% teaching load and gives you the opportunity to make a start with/work on your teaching portfolio for the University Teaching Qualification.

Would you like to learn more about what it’s like to pursue a PhD at Radboud University? Visit the page about working as a PhD candidate.