The impact of group counselling on the acceptance level towards parents of autistic children

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of the group counselling on the acceptance level towards the parents of autistic children by using information counselling. The study was done on two steps. The number of 26 autistic children parents attended to the pre-working group, 13 of them who are volunteer to attend to the programme, constituted the experimental group and the other 13 constituted the control group of the research. The main group was moderated in four sub-working group consisting 43 parents. Each of the families attended the working groups so that any control group was constituted. To determine the parents needs and expectations from the psychological counselling group, a survey called Family Needs Survey developed by the researcher her own was used. The acceptance levels, the intensity of the depressive behaviours and the changes in self-esteem of the parents were examined. Towards this purpose, before and after the information based counselling, parents were given the Beck Depression Inventory and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Finally, to assess the parents aspects about the programme; consisting of pleasure, parents offers and requests and the usefulness of the programme; a kind of feedback form was applied to the parents. Information based psychological counselling was proceeded by one day in a week lasted in 3 hours and included totally 8 meeting. The programme's concept is generally; giving information about autism to make the parents understand and know their children more, the skills can be gained by education and parents role during the children's educational process. On the other hand, the parents shared their emotions and thoughts about living with an autistic child, the relationships and the changes in the family roles within the family and how to cope with that new situation. In the assessment of the collected datas, for the repeated measures, Anova two-way variation analysis, technique is used. The results of the analysis showed that there is a positive impact of the information based counselling to decrease the depression levels of the parents however it is not effective to increase the self-esteem.