The relationship between the perception of social support levels and anxiety levels and the attitudes of child abuse

The aim of this study is to investigate the anxiety levels of the mothers with a disabled child, their level of perceived social support, their demographic attributes and the emotional and physical abuse and neglect of the disabled children displayed by their mothers. The study also analyzes the relationship between these abusive and neglectful behavior and the level of perceived social support, anxiety, education and income. The total sample of this case study is 160 mothers, 100 of which is accessed through various special education institutes around Istanbul and 60 of which is accessed through online surveys from various provinces. Parental Information Form, The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory For Adult (STAI-AD), Parental Attitude Form and Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS) was administered to the participants and SPSS-20 ( Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to analyze the resulting data. The respective analysis of the data suggests that the state, continuous and total anxiety levels of the mothers decrease as the level of perceived social support increases. The analysis displays that as the anxiety of the mothers increase, abusive and neglectful behaviors increase, while as the perceived social support increases, the emotional and physical neglect of the child decreases. The analysis points that mothers most often resort to emotional abuse. The study implies that a decline in income levels leads to a rise in physical neglect and the as the number of cared children increases, the emotional and physical abuse increases. The results also indicates that mothers inflict less emotional abuse to disabled children as their level of education increase.