Paul Bramston

• University of Southern Queensland

Environmental stewardship networks flourish across Australia. Although the environment benefits, this article looks to identify what volunteers draw from their stewardship. The authors adapted 16 questions that purportedly tap environmental stewardship motivation and administered them to a convenience sample of 318 university students and then to 8...

The Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) is used to assess the severity of symptoms in child and adolescent samples although its validity in these populations has not been demonstrated. The authors assessed the latent structure of the 21-item version of the scale in samples of 425 and 285 children and adolescents on two occas...

To determine the distress levels of adolescents leaving rural Queensland towns for urban boarding schools. A questionnaire study and focus groups were used to collect data from students who made the transition and those who did not. Two hundred and fifty-five rural students completed the questionnaire and of these 36 left home to attend an urban bo...

This study explores whether community sentiment factors can mediate structural disadvantage factors in rural youths’ intentions to stay in their home communities. In total, 3,023 Australians ages 13 to 18 years responded to items assessing community sentiment (belonging, sense of community, and social support) and subjective quality of life. Struct...

Stress is a major risk factor for mental health problems in individuals with intellectual disabilities, however few studies on stress have been conducted that take into account the perspective of both the person with the disability and the caregiver. The present study evaluated an informant version of the Lifestress Inventory, and compared it to th...

Quality of life is a popular measure of outcomes and its widespread use has led to recent calls for a better understanding of the construct, emphasizing the need to build a substantial body of knowledge around what determines perceptions of life quality. Three widely reported and used conceptual principles are examined in this study. Self-ratings o...

To date, there has been limited research into mood responses among adolescents with intellectual disability. One reason for this is the absence of a reliable and valid measure for the assessment of mood among this population. The present study evaluated such a measure among a sample of 135 adolescents with mild intellectual disability. Results supp...

This study investigates whether dimensions of sense of place can discriminate those residents who identify with their rural town, and prefer to stay, from those who do not, and whether patterns of association between these dimensions differ between adolescent and adult residents. Participants were 246 adults and 365 adolescents in two remote rural...

This study examines youths' experiences of loneliness and community connectedness in relation to seven domains of subjective quality of life among pre-adolescents, early adolescents, and middle adolescents. Participants consisted of 464 youth, ranging in age from 11 to 17 years, from two rural towns. Youth reported on their subjective experiences o...

Community integration has increasingly become the focus of research and practice in the field of intellectual disability. Recent research has demonstrated that community integration needs to be more than simply living within a community, people need to use the community and feel like they belong. This study pioneers the use of a sense of community...

Subjective quality of life is a popular measureof outcomes across fields as disparate asmedical research, community and healthpsychology and sociology. Its widespread usehas led to recent calls for a betterunderstanding of the psychological determinantsof the construct, emphasising the need to builda substantial body of knowledge around whatdetermi...

Community integration has long been acknowledged as a foundational goal of community-based care for young people with an intellectual disability. However, studies of community integration that consider the experiences of young people who have always lived in the "ordinary community" have been limited. This study reports a comparative analysis of aw...

Community integration has long been acknowledged as a foundational goal of community-based care for young people with an intellectual disability. However, studies of community integration that consider the experiences of young people who have always lived in the "ordinary community" have been limited. This study reports a comparative analysis of aw...

The assessment of emotional disorders such as anger, depression and stress among people with an intellectual disability has traditionally used one of three methodologies: ratings by a significant other, a clinical interview or self-report. Despite the widespread use of all three methodologies, there is little research into their equivalence. This p...

This paper examines the emotional distress of women in urban, rural and remote areas of Queensland. A randomised telephone survey of 394 women found that geographical location was not significantly related to perceptions of life quality or distress. Contrary to expectation, urbanisation and isolation were not significant predictors of mental health...

The purpose of the present research was to examine whether at-risk and not at-risk primary school aged students differ in two social and psychological domains (future goal orientations and social reputation). A total of 886 years 5, 6 and 7 students from five primary schools in the Brisbane metropolitan area of Queensland, Australia, participated i...

There has been little research on stress as perceived by people with an intellectual disability. This is somewhat surprising considering the changes in philosophy and service delivery models across the western world that have resulted in people with an intellectual disability being at the forefront of massive attitudinal shifts within society. In t...

This paper reports the results of a study into stress and quality of life in the parents of young people with an intellectual disability. Research in this area often finds that parents suffer stress as a result of having a son or daughter with an intellectual disability. According to Glidden (1993), this has led to the mistaken perception amongst r...

This study examines stress in the parents of adolescents and young adults with an intellectual disability and compares it with stress reported by parents with offspring without an intellectual disability. An initial qualitative pilot study lead the authors to Baine et al's Stress Scale. The Baine et al scale is relatively new and addresses aspects...

The Subjective Stress Scale (SSS; Bramston & Bostock, 1994) was developed to measure stress in people with a mild intellectual disability. In previous research, the SSS was found to measure two broad dimensions of stress (a) a General Worry factor and (b) a factor that tapped concerns about Negative Interpersonal Relations (Bramston & Fogarty, 1995...

This paper reports on an investigation into quality of life in the families of young people with intellectual disabilities. Quality of life is an emerging area of research in nursing, therefore some of the theoretical issues in definition and measurement of quality of life are discussed. These issues include objective and subjective dimensions, and...

The Subjective Stress Scale (SSS) was developed by Bramston and Bostock (1994) to provide a sensitive measure of stress for people with intellectual disabilities. This study examined the underlying structure of the SSS by analysing responses of 221 intellectually disabled people to the questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis of the interitem cor...

OBJECTIVE This paper documents the method and outcome of a project to introduce, throughout NSW, qualitative reviews of community group homes for people with disabilities. METHOD Set up demonstrations/training quality assurance reviews of group homes across the state to demonstrate the strengths and potential benefits of implementing such a scheme....

To review the quality of service in 7 residences for people with a disability administered by the NSW Department of Health in the New England Region. Evaluation of each residence by an evaluation team using an evaluation package incorporating three approaches to assessment: process measures, goal-oriented outcome measures, and interviews or questio...

Forty-eight moderately intellectually-handicapped, institutionalized adults were randomly assigned to a behavioural social-skills training (BSST), a cognitive social-problem-solving (SPS), attention-placebo control (APC) or no-treatment control (NTC) group. Significant improvement in basic social-skill performance was found for the BSST group but n...