Richard P. Hastings
Introduction
Richard P. Hastings is a British psychologist whose research has defined the modern study of families raising children with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including autism. Over three decades he has moved the field's centre of gravity away from a narrow focus on child deficits and toward the mental health of parents and siblings, the behaviour of paid support staff, and the design and evaluation of interventions that can actually be delivered in services. He moved from the University of Warwick — where he was Cerebra Chair of Family Research in the Centre for Educational Development, Appraisal and Research (CEDAR), with a joint appointment as Monash Warwick Professor at Monash University in Australia — to the University of Birmingham, where he holds the 125th Anniversary Chair and directs the Intellectual Disabilities Research Institute.
Hastings is unusual among senior researchers in this field in that he has also been one of its most persistent internal critics. He has argued that intervention research in intellectual disability has historically been small, underpowered and poorly reported, that researchers have over-fixated on difficulty while neglecting positive experience, and that studies conducted on disabled people rather than with them are both ethically and scientifically weak. Those commitments have shaped his later work, most visibly in the co-produced Who's Challenging Who? trial, which he led and which returned a null result on its primary outcome.
Early Life and Education
Hastings has described his entry into the field as a matter of chance rather than design. He read psychology as an undergraduate because it looked interesting and, like many students of his generation, assumed he would train as a clinical psychologist. In the summer of his second year he wrote to heads of clinical psychology services near his family home asking for work; only one replied, offering a post in a newly opened locally based hospital unit for people Moving out of a long-stay institution. He had, by his own account, never knowingly met anyone with a learning disability and was frightened and poorly prepared. The experience was also formative: he was bitten, kicked and scratched regularly, and he later recognised the burnout and negative attitudes he developed that summer as a research problem in its own right.
His final-year undergraduate dissertation examined self-injurious behaviour, and he stayed on for doctoral work on how support staff think and feel about challenging behaviour and how those responses influence what they do. Both his first degree and his PhD were in psychology at the University of Southampton. Rather than continuing to clinical training, he chose an academic career.
Academic and Professional Career
Hastings' first academic post was at the Institute of Child Health, University College London, where he worked from the late 1990s. He moved to the School of Psychology at Bangor University in 2002, spending eleven years there and building the family research group that made his reputation. In 2013 he joined CEDAR at the University of Warwick, taking up the Cerebra Chair of Family Research, a post funded by the charity Cerebra, and later adding the Monash Warwick professorship.
Alongside his own research he has exercised considerable influence over what gets published in the field. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, the leading international journal in the area, and sits on more than ten other editorial boards. A Stanford University-led analysis of career citation impact published in PLOS Biology placed him in the top 2% of researchers worldwide and ninth in the world in the field of rehabilitation, which covers most developmental disabilities research. He received the International Award of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in 2021 and holds fellowships of the British Psychological Society, the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and the Academy of Social Sciences.
His portfolio spans mental health problems and psychological interventions in children and adults with intellectual disability, family research and family support interventions, paid carers and staff, behaviours that challenge, academic interventions in special education settings, and stigma and attitude change. He leads the Cerebra 1,000 Families Study and has secured, with colleagues, research funding on the order of thirty million US dollars.
Major Contributions to Psychology
Families, stress and coping
Hastings' best-known work concerns the psychological well-being of parents raising children with intellectual disability or autism. Using both small-scale questionnaire studies and secondary analysis of large UK national datasets such as the Millennium Cohort Study and the ONS child mental health surveys, he and colleagues established that elevated parental stress in these families is real, partly explained by child behaviour and partly by poverty and lack of services. Crucially, he resisted the inference that families are simply damaged by disabled children: he has repeatedly shown that positive perceptions, benefit-finding and positive impact co-exist with strain, and he has criticised a literature that reports only the difficulties.
Behaviour that challenges and support staff
Before turning to families, Hastings studied the paid staff who support people with intellectual disability, showing that staff attributions and emotional reactions to challenging behaviour predict how they respond, and that exposure to aggression is associated with poorer work-related well-being. That work supplied the rationale for training interventions aimed at staff attitudes and also, indirectly, for the argument that staff behaviour can maintain the very behaviour it is meant to manage.
Co-production and the Who's Challenging Who? trial
Hastings led the largest randomized controlled trial of a staff training intervention co-designed and delivered by people with intellectual disability. Who's Challenging Who? was a half-day course, delivered by people with intellectual disability, intended to increase staff empathy and improve attitudes toward people whose behaviour is described as challenging. A cluster randomised trial across 118 residential settings found a small, statistically non-significant effect on the primary empathy outcome (Cohen's d of 0.19, p = 0.296), no significant effect on recorded incidents of challenging behaviour or on the use of restrictive practices, but small to moderate effects favouring the intervention on secondary outcomes including staff attitudes and work motivation.
Population-level evidence and stigma
A third strand uses national cohort data to quantify risk. Hastings and colleagues have documented the markedly elevated rates of mental health problems among children and adolescents with intellectual disability and autism, and have examined parental mental health and parenting behaviour as both risk and compensatory variables in early developmental pathways. His group has also developed and piloted psychosocial interventions to help people with intellectual disability manage stigma.
Major Publications
- Psychological Therapies for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities (2015), edited by John L. Taylor, William R. Lindsay, Chris Hatton and Richard P. Hastings
- "Who's challenging who training for staff empathy towards adults with challenging behaviour: cluster randomised controlled trial" (2018), Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 62(9), 798–813
- "Making the best of a bad situation"? — Hastings' family research is reported across several hundred journal articles rather than a small number of books, and his most-cited work appears in the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and Research in Developmental Disabilities
Where a definitive monograph does not exist, Hastings' legacy rests on this article literature rather than on a single canonical volume, and any reading list should begin with the Who's Challenging Who? trial report and his reviews of family well-being.
Impact and Legacy
Hastings has had an unusually direct effect on how services in the United Kingdom think about families. The idea that supporting a child with a disability requires supporting the parents' mental health, and that siblings have their own outcomes that deserve measurement, is now routine in policy documents and in the commissioning of family support, and his group's work with Cerebra is a large part of the reason. His insistence on co-production has also become normative: funders of disability research in the UK now routinely expect meaningful involvement of disabled people and family carers, a standard he argued for when it was far from universal.
The criticism his programme attracts is of two kinds. The first concerns the framing of family research itself. Disability studies and neurodiversity scholars contend that a literature organised around parental stress and "burden" risks locating the problem in the disabled child and in the family's response to him or her, when the more tractable causes are inadequate housing, income, education and respite. They also note that most studies in this tradition are cross-sectional and rely on self-report from small, self-selected, predominantly white and middle-class samples, which limits what can be concluded about causation. Hastings' response has been twofold: he has consistently published evidence of positive impact alongside strain, and he has argued that co-production with disabled people and carers is the correct remedy for a literature that might otherwise speak about rather than for them.
The second criticism is methodological and comes from within intervention science. The Who's Challenging Who? trial is the clearest illustration: despite being the largest and most carefully designed evaluation of a co-produced staff training course, it failed to move its primary outcome, produced no detectable change in recorded incidents or in the use of restraint, and retained primary outcome data from only about half of the staff randomised. Commentators have read this as evidence that attitude-change training, however well designed and however well received, has yet to be shown to change what staff do or what service users experience. Hastings and his colleagues published the null result prominently and argued instead that the trial's contribution lies in demonstrating that people with intellectual disability can co-design and deliver training to a high standard, and in the small-to-moderate effects observed on secondary outcomes. That disagreement — over whether a well-conducted null result is a foundation or a warning — is likely to shape the next generation of research in the field.