Elien Neimeijer

121 Implications for future research It has been argued in this dissertation that transactional processes between clients and sociotherapists underlie the quality of group climate. Clients were asked to give their opinion about the group climate by means of the GCI questionnaire and in-depth in- terviews (chapter 4). At the same time, sociotherapists were asked to give their opinion about aspects of their work climate such as team functioning and leadership (chapter 5). However, no studies have yet been done on sociotherapists’ account of their percep- tion and vision on group climate and the work climate. To fully capture the transaction- al processes that are assumed to underlie the quality of group climate, future research should investigate whether sociotherapists hold certain attitudes or cognitions that may influence the group climate as perceived by clients. This is important because attitudes may affect their professional behaviour (Frymier & Nadler, 2017; Knotter, 2019). In other words, to influence group climate, research should assess all the directions of trans­ actional processes between clients and sociotherapists. As part of a more integral point of view, contextual factors that directly influence the work climate of sociotherapists, and indirectly the group climate of clients, have to be taken into account (such as organ- isation culture, leadership, staff policies, implementation of the working method, perfor- mance monitoring, an policy in daily practice). This information can be useful in order to determine to what extent different organisational aspects influence work climate and group climate and whether organisational changes have to be made to improve quality of care. 2. Key finding two: The quality of group climate is associated with aggressive inci- dents and coercive measures Aggression is a major and common problem in secure forensic care (Akerman, Needs, & Bainbridge, 2018; De Decker et al., 2018; Robinson, Craig, & Tonkin, 2018; Ros et al., 2013; Van den Tillaart, Eltink, Stams, van der Helm, &Wissink, 2018) and health care fa- cilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities (CNV, Zorg & Welzijn, 2018; Knotter, 2019; Olivier-Pijpers, 2020). The results in this dissertation (chapter 3) show that a ther- apeutic group climate in which clients experience more support from sociotherapists, a more positive atmosphere at the living group and more possibilities for growth are related to less aggressive incidents. By contrast, repression was found to be associated with higher levels of aggression. Also, the number of aggressive incidents was positively