Developing and Validating a Behaviour Checklist for Adults with Intellectual Disability

About the Project

This PhD aims to develop and validate an adult version of the Behaviour Checklist, a tool originally developed for children with intellectual disability. The project will address the current lack of suitable behavioural assessment tools for adults with intellectual disability by adapting and validating the checklist.

Potential impact

This project will result in a validated, clinically useful assessment tool for adults with intellectual disability, grounded in current evidence and stakeholder experience. It will support more consistent understanding of behaviours of concern, ultimately improving care planning, service delivery, and outcomes.

Project summary and methodology

Applications are invited for a fully-funded PhD (fees + stipend) to begin October 2026 on a research project developing an adult version of the Behaviour Checklist, a tool originally developed for children with intellectual disability. The successful candidate will be based at University of Warwick and will be co-supervised by Dr Hayley Crawford (Warwick), Professor Caroline Richards, Professor Kylie Gray and Professor Peter Langdon (University of Birmingham).

There are 1.5 million people with an intellectual disability (ID) in the UK and over half of these present with intellectual disability associated with either a rare genetic syndrome or a co-occurring condition such as autism. People with moderate-profound intellectual disability and complex needs are at high risk for poor behavioural outcomes. We previously co-designed a clinical checklist of common and critical causes of poor behavioural outcomes to improve identification, monitoring and intervention pathways for children with intellectual disability and complex needs. This fully-funded PhD will aim to revise this checklist for an adult population, identify implementation opportunities and examine psychometric properties.

The research will consist of four interlinked studies:

1. Systematic literature review with potential meta-analyses on the causes and contributing factors of behaviours of concern in people with intellectual disability, synthesising current evidence across biological, psychological, and environmental domains.
2. Mapping assessment practices and identifying implementation opportunities to understand current behavioural assessment approaches and pinpoint where the checklist can be effectively integrated within adult ID services. This will involve stakeholder interviews to understand existing tools, referral pathways, and factors affecting checklist integration.
3. Stakeholder-informed adaptation involving focus groups with carers and clinicians, and a cognitive interview study, guiding the development of an adult-appropriate version of the Behaviour Checklist.
4. Psychometric evaluation of the adapted checklist, testing its reliability and validity in diverse adult care settings.