The quality of the work that paid support staff carry out within services for individuals with intellectual disability is clearly crucial to achieving positive quality of life outcomes for service users. Despite this fact, support staff have been relatively neglected as a focus for research within their field. That is not necessarily to say that there is no meaningful research with support staff as participants. The neglect is more to do with a lack of attention to theory and specifically to building a theoretical/conceptual understanding of the role that support staff fulfil. The purpose of this article is to discuss this neglect and to encourage systematic and theoretically rich research in future.