Investigation of the effect of parental education program applied to parents of children with autism on parents' levels of coping with stress, quality of life and social support

In the study, it was aimed to examine the effect of the parent education program applied to the parents of children with autism on parents' levels of coping with stress, quality of life and social support. The study group of the research consists of parents with children with autism between the ages of 5-17 who attend schools in the central district of Bartın province. The research was designed using an experimental design with pretest-posttest control group that requires measurement before and after the family education program in experimental and control groups. 15 parents participated in the parent education program, which was created in line with their needs by conducting focus group interviews with families, and the program was planned to be once a week and continued for a total of 9 weeks. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the program, no training was applied to the families in the control group. The levels of coping with stress of the parents in the experimental and control groups were evaluated through the data obtained from the "Pair Coping with Stress Inventory", their quality of life, the "Quality of Life in Autism Questionnaire" and the social support levels from the "Revised Parent Social Support Scale".Wilcoxon was used for intra-group analysis and Mann Whitney U Test was used for inter-group analysis in order to determine the difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the participants. The significance levels of the results obtained from the analyzes were considered as 0,05. As a result of the research, it was determined that the applied parent education program had a positive effect on coping with stress, quality of life and social support levels.