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A contemporary understanding of behaviour support requires the use of a person-centred approach to improving a persons quality of life. Life enrichment, choice and human rights are prioritised alongside strategies to reduce the negative impact of challenging behaviour in a person’s life. Such support should be delivered under a clear and accountable framework.
PBS is increasingly the preferred approach of behaviour support in Australia and internationally. It has emerged from the disability rights movement and is grounded in principles of person-centred practice that seek to protect and give expression to a person’s human rights.
PBS is focussed on enhancing quality of life through systems change (environmental redesign) and educational methods, and is underpinned by person-centred values (Horner et al., 1990), the science of applied behaviour analysis (Carr et al., 2002), and other evidence-based approaches (Gore, 2013); elements that continue to be emphasised in more contemporary definitions of PBS (e.g., Gore et al., 2022; Kincaid et al., 2016).
PBS integrates the following critical elements into a cohesive whole:
Different terms are used to refer to behaviours that negatively impact a person’s quality of life and may present risks of harm to the person or others. These might include behaviours of action (e.g., overt behaviours such as verbal and physical aggression, property damage, inappropriate social or sexual behaviours, wandering) or inaction (e.g., those related to lack of or reduced initiation or non-performance of behaviours).
We use the term ‘challenging behaviours’ because these behaviours challenge us as a service system to find a way to address the behaviour that is both effective (in increasing quality of life, decreasing the behaviour and reducing and eliminating restrictive practices) and also appropriate (respectful of a person’s rights, aligned with their values, and the expectations of the community).
In this way, the challenge is set to the system and service providers, and seeks to avoid pathologising or devaluing a person. Challenging behaviours do not occur in a vacuum; they are the result of an interplay between a person and their environment – and our primary focus is to identify and respond to unmet needs by building capable systems and meaningful environments.
Challenging behaviour is a term that is clearly defined in the literature and is the most commonly used term in research and practice. There are other terms used. For example, the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission refer to ‘behaviours of concern’ to describe behaviours that present risk of harm to the person and/or others and that negatively impact a person’s quality of life.
Preparing images for upload
This short tutorial aims to help you optimise your image so that is has appropriate dimensions and as small a file size as possible.
Know where your image is saved
Your image must be saved onto your computer and sitting somewhere in your computers file system. It doesn't matter where, as long as you know where it is.
If your image is currently attached to an email, you will need to save it into your computers file system.
We recommend having it saved on the Desktop for easy access.
Correct image dimensions
To check your images dimensions and file size, you can right-click on it and choose 'Properties'.
The recommended dimensions and file size for images uploaded to a BSPA calendar event are:
Width: between 600px & 900px
Height: between 350px & 600px
File size: less than 300kb
If your image dimensions are bigger than this, you can modify them in the next steps, but if they are smaller then you'll need to find another image.
Import image into online editor
If you are familiar with editing images in Photoshop or some other program, then simply use that program to modify the image so it is within the specifications listed in Step 2.
If not, then we recommend to use 'Photopea' which is a free full featured online image editor.
Click here to open: photopea.com
After it opens in a new browser tab, drag your image from your Desktop (or wherever you have it saved) onto the Photopea page. You can also click the "Open From Computer" link and browse through your computers file system to find and upload the image.
Modify image dimensions if needed
In the Photopea top menu, click Image > Canvas Size. It should open this box:
My sample is image mich taller than it is wide, so I'll reduce the height to make the image square.
In the height box, I'll enter "4128" so that it matches the width, then click OK. This has now cropped the image from the top and the bottom equally.
If the action of your image is all in the top part or bottom part of the image and you don't want to crop into that, then use the "Anchor" tool to tell the editor where to "anchor" the crop from. If you only want to crop the top part of the image, then click the bottom middle square on the Anchor before clicking OK and it will only crop the top of the image. This also works the same if you want to crop the left or right side of an image.
Reducing size and exporting
In the Photopea top menu, click File > Export as > WEBP. It should open this box:
Here you need to enter new dimensions, as per the recommendation in Step 2. Note that the Width and Height boxes are linked, so that when you change one, it will automatically update the other correspondingly. This is to ensure that the image does not get distorted from it's overall dimension ratio.
In the Width box, I'll enter "600", then I'll change the Quality from 92% down to 80%.
This has now updated the resulting file size which is shown at the bottom of the image. As you can see, it is well under the maximum file size of 300kb.
So now, click the Save button, give your image a meaningful name, preferably something similar to the name of the event, and save it onto your Desktop (or other preferred location on your computer).
You now have an optimised image ready for upload to your BSPA event.