Frequently Asked Questions

Among the 33 nurses who completed the survey, 18 (54.5%) had a positive overall attitude and the remainder had a neutral attitude on the Management of Aggression and Violence Scale. The study did not report any respondents with a negative overall attitude. The authors also found that total attitude scores were not correlated with age, sex, education level, clinical experience, or psychiatric experience in this sample.

No. The mean scores for all 5 statements in the MAVAS internal domain were greater than 2.5, which the study interpreted as disagreement that aggression was mainly due to factors within the patient. Respondents disagreed that aggression was common and not preventable in patients with mental illness, that patients became aggressive because they were ill, that certain types of patients were especially prone to aggression, and that aggression would resolve on its own if the patient was left alone.

No. In this study, nurses generally did not endorse environmental or interactional explanations for aggression. Mean scores were greater than 2.5 for all 3 external-factor statements and all 5 situational/interactional statements, indicating disagreement that a restrictive care environment, the physical setting, other people, poor listening, or staff communication contributed meaningfully to aggressive behavior.

The respondents also did not believe that improved one-to-one communication between staff and patients could reduce the incidence of aggression and violence.

The nurses in this sample did not view medication favorably as a violence-management strategy. They disagreed that medications were a valuable approach for treating violent patients, with a mean score of 3.3, and they also disagreed with statements supporting more frequent medication use in aggressive patients. At the same time, they did not believe that prescribed medications were a cause of violence.

• Negotiation: respondents agreed that negotiation was effective in managing aggressive patients.
• De-escalation: views were mixed, described in the study as agreement-to-disagreement regarding its use in preventing violence.
• Seclusion: respondents disagreed that seclusion was one of the most effective ways to manage this behavior, but opinions were divided on whether seclusion should be discontinued.
• Restraint: respondents disagreed that patients who are violent are often restrained for their own safety, and they also did not believe restraint was sometimes used more than necessary.

This was a survey study using a structured questionnaire, the Management of Aggression and Violence Scale, in a convenience sample of nurses from the emergency medicine department of a tertiary care hospital in South India. Of 35 invited staff nurses, 33 completed the questionnaire, and the study was conducted between August 2017 and December 2017.

These findings describe attitudes in that specific sample and setting. Because the sample was small, from a single tertiary care hospital, and recruited by convenience sampling, the results should be interpreted as a snapshot of local staff attitudes rather than as definitive estimates for all emergency department nurses.

No. The study found that the total MAVAS score was not correlated with age, sex, education level, clinical experience, or psychiatric experience. In this cohort, attitudes toward the causes and management of aggression did not appear to vary by the measured sociodemographic variables.

The main limitations evident from the article are the small sample size (33 respondents), the use of a convenience sample, and recruitment from a single tertiary care hospital emergency department in South India. In addition, all respondents were 20–30 years old, which makes the sample relatively homogeneous. These features limit how broadly the findings can be generalized.