QUALITY OF LIFE IN FAMILIES WITH AUTISTIC CHILDREN: A COMPARISON WITH FAMILIES OF NON-HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

• Main Author: GRAY, MARY MCPHAIL
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1980
• Subjects: Families & family life; Individual & family studies; Personal relationships; Sociology
• ISBN: 9798661321237

Purposes of the study were to: (1) explore the effects of autistic child on quality of life in families, (2) compare selfreported affective evaluations of life by autism parents with evaluations of life by parents of non-handicapped children, (3) identify the resources which are the most powerful predictors of family life evaluation for parents of autistic children in comparison to parents of non-handicapped children, (4) identify the evaluations of people and shared time resources which are the most powerful predictors of parent evaluations of family life in autism families in comparison to families with non-handicapped children, (5) investigate the differences in patterns of affective evaluations of life and family life in mothers of autistic children as compared with fathers, (6) describe the differences in affective evaluations of life, family life and selected resources by autism mothers who work for pay out of the home compared with autism mothers who do not. Data for the 22 autism families were collected in January and February of 1980 on individual self-administered written questionnaires completed by men and women in their homes in the presence of the researcher. Data for the 237 families of non-handicapped children were collected in the winter of 1978 on the same self-administered written questionnaires as part of the Quality of Life Research Project of the Departments of Family and Child Sciences and Human Environment and Design at Michigan State University. All families lived in the same household with at least one school-aged child. The autism sample was a volunteer group from a larger survey and represented autism families who were enough similar to those previously described in the literature to allow meaningful comparisons of results. The autism families and the families of non-handicapped children showed strong demographic similarities except for a somewhat smaller mean family size in the autism sample. Respondents evaluated their overall quality of life and family life by resources selected from Rettig, and by identified people and shared time resources, utilizing a terrible-delighted interval scale. Results of Pearson product moment correlations and forward stepwise regression analysis indicated that when evaluating family life, autism women consistently substituted variables evaluating children and shared time with children for variables evaluating spouse and marriage. Autism men consistently responded in patterns which were more similar to the parents of non-handicapped children. For autism women, people and shared time resources accounted for 52 percent of the variance in evaluation of family life; the Rettig resources accounted for only 42 percent of the variance in evaluation of family life. For autism men, the Rettig resources accounted for 82 percent of the variance in evaluation of family life as compared to only 63 percent accounted for by the people and shared time resources. The Rettig resources were more powerful predictors of affective evaluations of family life for both men and women in families with non-handicapped children than the people and shared time resources. In cross tabulations of husbands' and wives' evaluations of life, family life, spouse, marriage and children, the autism couples showed the highest agreement for evaluation of children, and the least agreement on evaluation of marriage and life-as-a-whole. While the autism parents' evaluations of their spouse were generally high, women do not use this variables to evaluate their satisfaction with family life. Family, for autism women, was more directly linked to life with children than was true for autism men or men and women in families with non-handicapped children. When autism women were separated into employed and unemployed samples, the employed women showed significantly higher evaluations of overall life and satisfaction with sexual relationship than the unemployed women.