Study of the functional resource of families raising children with disabilities

Abstract

Introduction. Today much attention is paid to the role of a family in the system of psychological, medical and pedagogical support for children with disabilities. The need to study the functional resource of a family with a child with special educational needs in order to identify its problem areas and determine psychotherapeutic targets determines the relevance of this study. Materials and methods. The study involved 32 families raising children with disabilities aged 4 to 7; the comparison group consisted of 32 families raising healthy children of the same age. The experience of family life is 5-8 years. The age of parents is from 27 to 38 years old. The following research methods and techniques were used: a test of the functional resource of the family by N.M. Lavrova and V.V. Lavrov; statistical processing was carried out using Pearson's chi-squared goodness-of-fit test and Fisher's angular transformation test. Results. In the group of families raising healthy children, in 9 families the functional resource indicators corresponded to the "high positive" zone, in 22 families an “average positive” resource was determined, in one family – a low positive resource. Among families raising a child with disabilities, two families had indicators on the border of “high positive”/“average positive” resource, in most cases (18 families) the indicators showed an “average positive” resource; in 12 families, the indicators corresponded to a “low positive” and “weakly negative” resource. When comparing indicators in families raising a child with disabilities with indicators in families with a healthy child, using Pearson's chi-squared goodness-of-fit test, significant differences were revealed (χ2 value is 19.620, p≤0.01). This indicates that the functional resource of families raising a child with disabilities is significantly lower than that of families raising a healthy child. The study of the functional resource of the family by this method made it possible to identify problem areas and determine the direction of the study of response patterns using a focused genogram in order to determine therapeutic targets. Conclusions. The data obtained in the study of the functional resource of the family using the test by N.M. Lavrova and V.V. Lavrov made it possible to state that the functional resource of families raising a child with disabilities is lower than the functional resource of families raising a healthy child; the analysis of the responses of a husband and wife in the same family allows identifying problem areas of the family and studying them using the analysis of a focused genogram.