Abstract
Abstract The study focuses on siblings of children with disabilities (CD) in order to investigate: (a) basic components of the sibling personality (self-concept, self-esteem, feelings of loneliness, main needs, nature of anxiety, and attitudes), (b) the representation of family functioning and parental figures, and of social environment, and (c) sibling relationship. The sample consisted of 20 families raising a CD and 20 families raising children without disabilities (CWD). The total number of participants was 151 individuals (80 parents and 71 children). The measures used were the following: (a) self-report measures: (1) Self-concept Scale for Children Lipsitt [SC], (2) Children's Loneliness Questionnaire [CLQ], (3) Hare Self-esteem Scale [HSS] and (4) Family Adaptability Cohesion Evaluation Scale (FACES-III); (b) projective tests: (1) Thematic Apperception Test [TAT], (2) Children's Apperception Test [CAT] and (3) Le dessin de famille; and (c) semi-structured but focused interviews with the parents. Th...
Highlights
The study focuses on siblings of children with disabilities (CD) in order to investigate: (a) basic components of the sibling personality, (b) the representation of family functioning and parental figures, and of social environment, and (c) sibling relationship
The present study aims to contribute to this area by focusing on how siblings of a child with disabilities experience their family and social environment to depict the presence or absence of certain components of their personality, and try to compare them to the siblings of children without disabilities
There were no significant differences in the means of the self-esteem of siblings of both research groups which declare high degree of self-esteem
Summary
The study focuses on siblings of children with disabilities (CD) in order to investigate: (a) basic components of the sibling personality (self-concept, selfesteem, feelings of loneliness, main needs, nature of anxiety, and attitudes), (b) the representation of family functioning and parental figures, and of social environment, and (c) sibling relationship. Relationships among siblings are of high interest for family researchers (Seligman and Darling 2007) for many reasons: (a) the bonds of siblings constitute an individual’s point of reference because they are often the longest relationships in an individual’s lifetime, and because they are the part of the family of origin that survives after the parents have passed away, and (b) siblings share the parental expectations of the future child during the mother’s pregnancy and the excitement that follows the birth of the newborn It is siblings who participate in the bereavement that follows the realization that the ‘new baby’ is a child with disabilities. Since 1990 (Stoneman 2001), researchers studying CD with a wide range of disabilities have overwhelmingly found no differences in self-concept or in perceived competence between groups of children who do and do not have a sibling with disabilities (e.g. McMahon et al 2001; Roeyers and Busse 2003; Singhi, Malhi, and Dwarka 2002, as cited in Stoneman 2001)
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