Parental Perception During Periods of Transition by Sean Newsome - Book Report/Review Example

Parental Perception During Periods of Transition: Implications for Social Workers and Serving Families Coping with Autism By W. Sean Newsome, MSW Published in Journal of Family Social Work, Vol. 5(2) 2000 Critical Appraisal: Introduction: This is an original work by W. Sean Newsome. In this article he has reported his work on the perception of parents having kids suffering with autism about the stress they and their family members face during the period of transition and also about the kind of services they get from social workers serving such families during the period of transition. Its is a good piece of work in the sense that it has brought about relevant issues related to a very important subject - autism, and has presented the quantitative measures of relevant variables like the degree of stress the families with kids having autism suffer and also what they perceive about the kind of services they receive. This article will be critically analyzed in this paper for different its different aspects like research design, sampling, data collection, analysis and findings. The analysis is presented below. Research Design: This research was designed to collect data by telephonic interview with the subjects and asking them a properly designed questionnaire. The response of the subjects were recorded and analyzed to extract useful information and the underlying trends about the variables of interest. The important aspects of this research design are - Formulation of the problem for investigation, Selection of Subjects, Preparing a Suitable Questionnaire, Conducting telephonic interview to collect data and analysis of this data by adopting suitable statistical procedures, Interpretations of the findings of the statistical procedures employed in this study. These aspects as relevant to this research are briefly discussed in subsequent sections. Formulation of the Problem As autism is a complex autism disorder that affects development of kids, therefore, it is very natural that father, mother and families having someone with autism will be under severe stress. The level of stress is bound to increase further when there is a transition like when such families shift from one locality to another and also when such a child goes from one school to another or during similar other transitions. Therefore, it is important that a research was conducted to determine the level of stress such families undergo during the period of transition. Such families normally seek and get support from social service workers and it is important to assess what such families feel about effectiveness of such supports. This is important as it will serve as a feedback for improving the services of the social workers and that will in turn help in lessening the stress of families with children suffering with autism during the period of transition. Therefore, the formulation of the problem by Sean in this work is very relevant and good. Preparing a Suitable Questionnaire Collecting good data is at the heart of any statistical analysis procedure and to be able to collect good data it is important to determine, what are the variables. In this case variables were to come out from the questions that form the part of questionnaire and therefore, it important to ensure that the questions be designed properly keeping in mind the problem being examined in the research work. In this case the variables were "stress level", "social work support" and "effectiveness of various professional supports". Therefore, a questionnaire was designed to measure the perception of these variables different scales - scale of 1 to 10 for stress level and effectiveness of various professional supports" and scale of 1 to 4 for "social work support". The questions were determined based on extensive literature review in the area of autism and transition and in consultation with the professionals working in this field at ASM and Wayne State University Affiliate Program (UAP) in Developmental Disabilities. Sampling and Data Collection Subjects were chosen as a convenience sample. The families having a child with autism and have made transition were selected from the membership list of Autism Society of Michigan. A convenience sample is considered as the weakest method of data selection and therefore, this is the weak link of this study. The only advantage of a convenience sample is that it is easy to select the sample but the negative is the credibility of the representative character of the sample and generalizability of the findings of the research. Telephonic interview was conducted to seek the response of the subjects against the questions in the questionnaire. This is a reasonably good method of data collection, however, the pen and paper based data collection against the questionnaire would have been better as response of subjects is expected to be more genuine when no one is knowing, what his response is and this is possible only in pen and paper based data collection and not in interviews. Analysis of Data The data was analyzed by Sean using appropriate statistical procedures like "Descriptive Statistics", "one-way ANOVA" and "Hypothesis Testing". These are the appropriate statistical procedures to analyze the kind of data in this research under considerations and therefore, no question marks can be put on the statistical procedures adopted by Sean in this work. The analysis of data reveals that stress level perceived by parents for themselves has a mean stress level of 7.18 on the scale of 1 to 10 - '1' means very low level of stress and '10' means very high level of stress. The mean stress level perceived by parents for their child was 7.25 and the mean stress level perceived by parents for the entire family was 7.37. Similarly, the mean of the support from social service as perceived by parents and the respective standard deviation was also calculated and reported by Sean in this work. He has also calculated and reported the mean and standard deviation of the support (as perceived by parents) from other professionals like general education, school administration, and social worker, psychologist, and psychiatrist and special education professionals. Interpretations of the Findings Sean has interpreted the findings in the light of the problem being investigated and there is hardly any flow in the way he has interpreted the findings of his work. He has even acknowledged that as his samples were convenience samples so the findings cannot be generalized. However, he has rightly asserted that the findings are significant and therefore, a detailed work is needed to be done with a large and randomized sample, so that the problem can be addressed in an effective manner. Conclusion It can be concluded that the work by Sean is an important work in the area which needs more attention and this work is a good contribution in this area. Coping and Social Support for Parents of Children with Autism By Edith H. Luther, RN MSN; Daryl L. Canham, RN, EdD, C; and Virginia Young Cureton, RN, DrPH Critical Appraisal: Introduction: This is an original work by Edith H. Luther et al about the way parents and family members cope with the stress due to their child suffering with autism and the kind of social support they receive. The researchers have carried out extensive literature survey in the area of autism and its effect on the different aspects of the life of the family having a child with autism. As autism is a complex development disorder, the families raising them are under severe stress, they need to spend more time and resources on such a child and this in turn affects the career, profession and leisure time of the parents and the time and resource they can spend on their other children. As the stress level is really very high different families evolve different level of coping mechanism to minimize the stress level. Besides, such families also seek and get support from social service agencies and that goes a long way in reducing the stress level of the family. Significant amount of work has been done in this field and the researchers have done extensive literature survey of the work done in this area. In this paper, the researchers have focused their attention on the coping strategies of the families having a child suffering from autism and social service received by them. This article will be critically analyzed in this paper for different its different aspects like research design, sampling, data collection, analysis and findings. The analysis is presented below. Research Design: This research was designed to collect data by survey. A questionnaire was presented to the subjected that consented to be part of the research and their response was collected and analyzed to extract useful information and the underlying trends about the variables of interest. The important aspects of this research design are - Formulation of the problem for investigation, Selection of Subjects, Preparing a Suitable Questionnaire, Conducting pen and paper based survey to collect data and analysis of this data by adopting suitable statistical procedures, Interpretations of the findings of the statistical procedures employed in this study. These aspects as relevant to this research are briefly discussed in subsequent sections. Formulation of the Problem As autism is a complex autism disorder that affects development of kids, therefore, it is very natural that father, mother and families having someone with autism will be under severe stress. Due to this stress each family evolves a coping mechanism to minimize this stress. Besides, such families also seek and get support from social service agencies to reduce the stress level and for development of the child with autism. The issue to be examined in this research work was different strategies adopted by families to cope with the stress due to raising a child with autism and also the social support they seek and receive. The problem is well defined in this paper and what needs to be done is clearly set out. Preparing a Suitable Questionnaire Collecting good data is at the heart of any statistical analysis procedure and to be able to collect good data it is important to determine, what are the variables. In this case variables were to come out from the questions that form the part of questionnaire and therefore, it important to ensure that the questions be designed properly keeping in mind the problem being examined in the research work. The questions were determined based on extensive literature review in the area of autism. The questionnaire was a demographic questionnaire and two Likert-type scales composed of questions seeking the information about coping strategies and formal and informal type of social support. The response consisted of 5 options with '1' meaning strongly disagree and '5' meaning strongly agree. The coping scale was designed to allow analysis of subscales for different coping strategies and the demographic questionnaire was designed to collect data on stressors in the family. Besides, the demographic questionnaire; F-COPES developed by McCubbin and Larsen in 1981 and SSI developed by McCubbin et al (cited in McCubbin et al, 1996) were used as instruments in this analysis to collect relevant data. Thus it can be concluded that questionnaire design was appropriate considering the issue under examination. Sampling and Data Collection Subjects were chosen as a convenience sample. A total of 72 families having a child with autism were selected as sample. These were the parents of 5 to 13 year old children with autism, who were enrolled in special education classes in a South California county. The only advantage of a convenience sample is that it is easy to select the sample but the negative is the credibility of the representative character of the sample and generalizability of the findings of the research. These 72 families were sent the questionnaire with the instruction for the head of the family to complete the same and return within three weeks. Only 18 out of 72 (the total sample size) questionnaire were returned. This effectively reduces the sample size to 18. Even a sample size of 72 will be considered a small sample for drawing any significant conclusion and 18 in any case is very small sample. The extremely small sample size along with the fact that it was a convenience sample and not a random sample puts a big question mark on the validity, applicability and generalizability of the findings reported in this paper. Analysis of Data The demographic data was analyzed using "Descriptive Statistics" and appropriated information was extracted like how many children were living with married parents or single parents; income and ethnicity of their family etc. The mean total score on the F-COPES for the parents of children with autism was 103.8 as compared to 93.1 for men and 95.6 for woman in normed group. The mean score for subscales on F-COPES were also measured and reported in this paper. Interpretations of the Findings Researchers have rightly interpreted the results of their data analysis in the context of the problem under investigation and the data they have collected and have drawn conclusions in line with their aim of research. There is no issue regarding the conclusions they have drawn. Conclusion While the researchers have done extensive literature survey, and have designed the research in an appropriate manner. They have used right instruments as well for data collection, right procedures for data analysis and have drawn right conclusions, but still a big question mark remains on the validity and generalizability of their findings. This is because; the sample size was too small to draw any meaningful conclusion. Therefore, it can be concluded that the work needs to be repeated with a large sample size and the sample should be drawn preferably as random sample and not convenience sample. Read More