Investigation of the relationship between personality traits of parents who have a disabled child and stress, empathy and depression levels

The aim of this research is to examine the relationships between personality traits of parents who have children with disabilities and their stress, empathy and depression levels. The sample of the research consists of 320 parents from Mehmet Oyal Special Education School in Beyoğlu, Halıcıoğlu Hearing Impairment School and other special education and rehabilitation centers in İstanbul, which their children trained in. Paricipants completed demographic information form, Five Factor Personality Inventory, CES Depression Scale, Stress and Empathy Scales. Cronbach Alpha and Gutman Reliability Analyzes, Pearson Moments Multiplication Correlation Coefficient Analysis, Regression, t-Test and One-way ANOVA were used in the analysis of data. The data were analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package For Social Sciences). According to the results, there is a positive relationship between the agreeableness and the conscientiousness dimensions of the parents personality. It has been seen that the personality traits of individuals with disabilities have predicted depression, stress and empathy. A statistically significant difference was found between the sexes in terms of neurotism. According to this, women havea higher score on the level of neurotism than men. Comparisons of participants' marital status found that married and self-divorced participants differed in the dimension of conscientiousness, and that the levels conscientiousness married participants were significantly higher than those of widowed or divorced participants. The t-test was conducted to determine whether the participants have a significant difference in depression averages compared to the gender variable. The result of the t-test shows that the stress averages of the fathers were higher than those of the mothers in order to determine whether the stress averages of the participants showed a meaningful difference according to the gender variable. In terms of educational levels, it has been found that there is a difference in the extroversion dimension of the participants. According to this, those who graduated from junior high school, high school and college were found to be more extrovert than those who graduated from primary school. On the other hand, according to the primary school graduates of the high school graduates, the university graduates were found to have opennness to experience than the secondary and high school graduates. In addition, participants showed significant differences in depression scores according to level of education, and high school graduates have significantly higher scores on depression than junior high school, primary school, and college graduates. Comparisons of economic status of individuals with disabilities show that parents with moderate and good economic status are more extrovert than those with low economic status. It is seen that these findings are related to depression, empathy and stress factors in the demographic characteristics of parents with handicapped children as well as their personality characteristics.