Study of Stress and Coping in Parents of Intellectually Disabled Children and the Effects of an Intervention Programme

Abstract

newline This research is first of all an assessment of the stress and coping level of the parents who have intellectually disabled children through cross-sectional descriptive method. Through Stratified Random Sampling method six special schools are selected from the state of Goa. The sample size of the parents is 116. The socio demographic sheet with selected variables is filled. Stress and coping scores are assessed through the questionnaire. The stress and coping scores are tested for normality by residual analysis in regression model. Regression analysis and the residual plots suggest that the data is normal and hence parametric tests can be used for further analysis. Correlation analysis is used to determine if there exist any relationship between the stress level and the coping level. Descriptive analysis is used to understand the behavior of the data which includes Mean, Median, Mode, Standard deviation, percentages, skewness, kurtosis etc. for the categorization of stress and coping scores in their subscales and later also for the comparisons according to the variables. Analysis of variance single factor and student s t-test are used to determine for any statistical difference in stress and coping level based on different variables. All tests are carried out at 95% confidence level. Thus, in all cases the p value is compared with the alpha level 0.05 to indicate if the results are statistically significant. The parents, whose coping scores are below the overall mean score, are chosen for the intervention programme. An independent two-sample t-test is used in case two different samples are compared, while a paired t-test is used in case the scores are collected on the same sample before and after the intervention programme. The intervention programme includes CBT, Group therapy, JPMR, Psycho-education and Spiritual inputs. The pretest and posttest scores are compared and the intervention programme is found to be effective.