Examining the anxiety and social support levels of mothers with mentally retarded children, who attend to 1st and 4th grade in a training school at ankara, according to mother?s problems with which they faced.

This study aimed to examine anxiety and social support levels of mothers with mental retarded children according to the problems that the mothers faced with.Entire sampling model was used in this study. The sample was consist of 151 mothers whose mentally retarded child were attending to 1st and 4th grade in a training school at Ankara.In this study, as data collection tools, ?Personal Information Form? and ?Questionnaire Form?, which were developed by the researcher and were composed of the questions including information and problems of mothers ; ?Questionnaire on Resources and Stress? (QRS) developed by Akkök; and ?The Family Support Scale? developed by Kaner.Data obtained from the study were analyzed with the SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 12.0 program. In two-group comparisons Mann-Whitney U and in three- and more group comparisons Kruskall-Wallis Test were used. The relationships between variables were analyzed by using Spearman Correlation Analysis. As a significance level, .05 and .01 were used. The results of this study indicated that the mothers of children at 1st grade had a grater anxiety level than the mothers of children at 4th grade. The anxiety levels of both groups were high at the subscales Limits on Family Opportunities and Life Span Care and Personal Burden for Respondent. While Lack of Personal Reward and Physical Limitations scores of mother with children at 4th grade were higher than the mothers with children at 1st grade, Cognitive Impairment scores of mother with children at 1st grade were higher than the mothers with children at 4th grade. When the social support scores of mothers with children at 4th grade were analyzed, it is found that their scores were lower than the mothers of children at 1st grade.