Your Partner Makes You Better: The Partner Interaction Paradigm in Conflict Training

The preparation for physical and non-physical conflict in educational settings is part of many professions like the police, (Rajakaruna, Henry, Cutler, & Fairman, 2017), the military (Jensen, 2014) or emergency medical service providers (Gormley, Crowe, Bentley, & Levine, 2016). Recent studies investigating conflict management programs, like police use of force training (Cushion, 2018; Renden, Savelsbergh, & Oudejans, 2016), suggest, that training has yet to be optimized to ensure transferability of skills from the learning to the criterion environment. Current research (Körner & Staller, 2017; Staller, Cole, Zaiser, & Körner, 2017a; Staller, Zaiser, & Körner, 2017b) indicates, that representative learning design in conflict training is key with regard to that issue.

The current presentation argues to emphasize the interaction between training partners in physical conflict training (e.g. self-defence training) and to systematically develop the competencies of the training partners to practice in a representative way without comprising (a) health and safety issues and (b) motivation. We propose the Partner Interaction Paradigm (PIP) as a paradigm to develop, design and evaluate partner interaction in conflict training. Further directions of the PIP in various contexts of conflict training will be discussed.

Cushion, C. J. (2018). Exploring the Delivery of Officer Safety Training: A Case Study. Policing,5(4), 1. http://doi.org/10.1093/police/pax095

Gormley, M. A., Crowe, R. P., Bentley, M. A., & Levine, R. (2016). A national description of violence toward emergency medical services personnel. Prehospital Emergency Care, 20(4), 439–447. http://doi.org/10.3109/10903127.2015.1128029

Jensen, P. R. (2014). Hand-to-Hand Combat and the Use of Combatives Skills: An Analysis of United States Army Post-Combat Surveys from...West Point, NY: United States Military Academy.

Körner, S., & Staller, M. S. (2017). From system to pedagogy: towards a nonlinear pedagogy of self-defense training in the police and the civilian domain. Security Journal, 25(4), 207. http://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-017-0122-1

Rajakaruna, N., Henry, P. J., Cutler, A., & Fairman, G. (2017). Ensuring the validity of police use of force training. Police Practice and Research, 18(5), 507–521. http://doi.org/10.1080/15614263.2016.1268959

Renden, P. G., Savelsbergh, G. J. P., & Oudejans, R. R. D. (2016). Effects of reflex-based self-defence training on police performance in simulated high-pressure arrest situations, 1–11. http://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2016.1205222

Staller, M. S., Cole, J. C., Zaiser, B., & Körner, S. (2017a). Representative training with less risk: The effects of non-lethal training and conventional ammunition in police use of force training on heart rate variability. Policing, 1–15. http://doi.org/10.1093/police/pax054

Staller, M. S., Zaiser, B., & Körner, S. (2017b). From Realism to Representativeness: Changing Terminology to Investigate Effectiveness in Self-Defence. Martial Arts Studies, (4), 70–77. http://doi.org/10.18573/j.2017.10187