Insight into Acquired Brain Injury by Christine Durham & Paul Ramcharan

Author:Christine Durham & Paul Ramcharan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

However, as argued below, perceptions of success and failure are also important particularly for people with ABI given their circumstances. The person with ABI may have experienced failure in every attempted task—in many things they do, inter alia—they cannot walk, talk or even eat properly. The individual may also face failure in everything they think, they do not know what day it is, they forget names (including their own name), they do not know what a cup or a hairbrush is and they cannot follow conversations. They attribute failure (and the resultant feelings of being dumb or stupid) to nearly everything. It was recognised that having such attributes could affect their willingness to engage with Keys to the ABI Cage and the study.

Weiner’s (1985) attribution theory states that students attribute success or failure according to their perceptions of why they might have succeeded or failed in the past. Weiner suggests that success or failure of tasks can depend on factors that include ability, effort, luck, fatigue, ease or difficulty of the task. If ‘success’ depends on attributes over which the person believes they have control, such as putting in an effort, a hypothesis was made that students (people with ABI) would be more likely to have confidence to be involved with the task rather than when success depends on external conditions over which they have no control, such as the difficulty of the exam (test, questionnaire).Weiner’s attribution theory suggests that the person with ABI, whose cognition, emotions, memory and confidence is damaged, may believe that failure is most likely because they attribute the situation to be dominated by external (outside the person), unstable (the outcome is not as intended) and uncontrollable factors. They are not ‘in control’.

In order to counteract these factors, the persons with ABI involved with this study were informed in the advertisement, and during the preinterview phone conversations, that their personal insights were important, their comments were valuable and that they would be able to choose what they said. Barkley (2010) has also shown how ‘success’ is built into a task: when there is no right or wrong answers, the person is encouraged and praised for their wisdom and the person has the power to control the discussion (Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.3Headwork 19: Keys to the ABI Cage addresses the issue of attribution of success

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