Exploring the Effect of 1:1 Acceptance and Commitment Training Sessions on Staff Engagement in Committed Actions using Ecological Momentary Assessment

Stress can impact the quality of care that support staff provide to clients with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) within community agencies. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy/Training (ACT) focuses on helping people develop psychological flexibility to improve well-being. This study evaluated the impact of standard self-monitoring procedures (e.g., pen and paper), Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) via a smartphone application and EMA plus three, brief, 1:1 ACT coaching sessions on the occurrence of committed actions (CAs). Four senior staff from a community agency took part in this multi-phased intervention. The coaching sessions were informed by a previous evaluation conducted with caregivers (Gould et al., 2018). A concurrent multiple-baseline design across four staff was used to evaluate engagement in CAs across baseline, training, post-training, and follow-up phases. Although participant engagement in CAs did not increase in the training phase (EMA alone and EMA+ACT), staff and agency leaders reported high acceptability of the goals, procedures and outcomes o f the study. These findings will inform procedural modifications including how the dependent variable is measured and will address feedback provided by participants. The dependent variable was dichotomous, which limited the opportunity for behavioural variability to be observed, which will be adapted for future research. Gaps in ACT literature may begin to be addressed from the findings, and also help to inform how EMA can be leveraged to add validity to outcomes in ACT research, specifically within community support agencies.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A. Applied Disability Studies

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Faculty of Social Sciences

Department dc:contributor.department

Center for Applied Disability Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

Brock University

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Grant, Kristin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Thomson, Kendra

• SOCIAL SCIENCES::Social sciences
• TECHNOLOGY::Other technology
• SOCIAL SCIENCES::Social sciences::Education
• SOCIAL SCIENCES::Other social sciences::Public sector research

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10464/19332

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:brocku.scholaris.ca:10464/19332