The purpose of this paper is to report the results of research which examined factors that influence the occurrence and the seriousness of adverse incidents in residential facilities. The general hypothesis tested was: the seriousness and the occurrence of adverse incidents in residential facilities are influenced by a combination of employee and organizational characteristics, resident specific and event specific variables.Canonical correlation was used to assess the relationship between multiple independent variables and three dependent measures of seriousness. A two factor solution emerged with canonical correlations of 0.57 and 0.50 (c .05). Discriminant analysis was performed using two pair of respondents: those not involved in adverse incidents and those involved in one incident, and those involved in one incident and those involved in two or more incidents. Discriminant functions were obtained in these two analyses that correctly classified 70% and 88% of the cases respectively.