Investigating the interactions of mothers with their premature /low-birth-weight and full-term children comperatively

The aim of this study is to present comparatively the interaction of mother-child dyads in premature / low -birth -weight children who are developmentally at risk and full-term dyads with normal development. This study presents (1) the description of mother-child interaction behaviors, (2) the relations within mothers' own interaction behaviors and the interactional behaviors of mothers which have significant influences on children's interaction style, (3) and an enquiry on the presence of differences in interactions between two groups of mother-child dyads. This study was conducted in Tekirdağ with the involvement of 10 mother-child dyads who are full-term with normal development and 10 mother-child dyads being premature or with low-birth-weight, who are 10-29 months old. Following the arrangement of an appointment with the families, the researcher visited their residences in order to collect data by means of a demographic information form and video recording of the free play session. Toys and materials, appropriate for the development and the interests of the children were set in the same way in every residence before recording. The researcher ignored the first 5 and last 5 minutes of the recordings which took for 20 minutes without interruption. Then, the recordings were analyzed by the researcher and an expert via Turkish versions of the Maternal Behavior Rating Scale and the Child Behavior Rating Scale .The rate of inter-observer reliability was found to be 90 %. Attained data were analyzed through Kendall's tau Test and Mann-Whitney U Test along with the calculation of frequency, percentage and standard deviation. According to the findings attained in this research, description of mother-child dyads' interaction behaviors; the judgements of mothers' own interaction behaviors on its own merit and the interaction behaviors of children which are significantly influenced by mother interaction style were stated. It was concluded that there is no significant differences in interaction behaviors of mother-child dyads in both groups. Key words: children born with low-birth-weight, mother-child interaction, premature