What is it about?
We wanted to know if providing multi-sensory environments (also sometimes referred to as Snoezelen) would reduce the challenging behaviours of people with severe intellectual disabilities. We used a crossover design so everyone received the multi-sensory environment during the course of the study, to find out whether it would make a difference. We could not find a difference due to the multi-sensory environment, ad speculate that the higher frequency of personal interactions (which occurred in both conditions) led to improvements in behaviour.
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Why is it important?
It demonstrated that multi-sensory environments such as this one do not improve people's behaviour as we had hoped.
Perspectives
This is a good example of trying to find a robust effect in the field of research in intellectual disability, which has proved remarkably hard. It has helped to persuade me that more individually oriented designs would be better for identifying causal relationships in intellectual disability research.
Dr Timothy Ivor Williams
University of Reading
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Behavioural effects of long-term multi-sensory stimulation, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, February 1998, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1998.tb01280.x.
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