Systematic Review on Social Support of Parent/Parents of Disabled Children

Parents with a disabled child face many challenges, including the imbalance between work and leisure, limited social life and time limitations. Social support is a multidimensional index that shows the individual’s perception of being supported, loved, and valued. Owing to the importance of social support of parents/caregivers of disabled children and its impact on their physical, psychological, social and spiritual aspects, a systematic review was conducted with an aim to assess and summarize the results of the studies already conducted in our country.
The study population included all the published articles since February 1395, containing quantitative data about the social support of disabled parents from the studies conducted in Iran in Persian. In the first phase, in order to achieve related studies, four categories of related keywords were included: 1=(support, social support), 2=(father, mother, parent, caregiver), 3=(child, girl, son) and 4=(handicapped, disabled, exceptional, patient) to search in the scientific databases of Iranmedex, SID, Magiran, Noormags and Google Scholar. Specialized journals such as Archives of Rehabilitations, Journal of Modern Rehabilitation, Journal of Paramedical Science and Rehabilitation and Journal of Research in Rehabilitation Sciences were also visited to access all articles. In all, 683 studies were obtained, in this phase. In the second phase, according to the title of studies, repetitive and non-related subjects were excluded; thus 384 studies remained. Then, considering the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the abstracts of the remaining studies were reviewed. The quality of the methods used to search articles (based on the exact definition of the target group, type of study, sampling method, sample size, validity and reliability of the data gathering tool) were also assessed. Finally, 14 studies remained for the final evaluation. The required data were extracted from the studies according to the table of findings for the qualitative analysis of the data. To increase the validity of the study, each process of search in different databases, initial review of the articles, adaptation to the criteria and investigation of the quality of studies was done by two researchers independently; in case of any disagreement, a consensus was reached with the help of the opinion of a third researcher.
Based on the methodologies used and the subsequent findings, all the 14 articles were found to be cross-sectional, half of them were correlation studies, and the remaining were causal-comparative studies. In this review, 5 different tools were used for data collection; more than half of the studies (57%) used the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, followed by the Scale of Social Support developed by Vaux et al. (14.2%). It is noteworthy that majority (64%) of the studies examined the mother and others considered both parents. Children with intellectual disabilities, such as mental retardation and Down syndrome had the highest (34.48%) support, followed by children with hearing impairments (17.24%), physical-movement disorders (17.24%) and visual impairments (13.79%). Studies that compared social support between parent/parents of ordinary children with disabled ones showed that there was a significant difference between social protections of the two groups. The relationship between social support and mental health, mindfulness, resilience, life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, psychological well-being, adaptability, stress, stress coping strategies and post-traumatic stress variables have been discussed in these studies.
Social support of parents with a disabled child has been addressed more in recent years. The articles on social support of parents examined only the effect of taking care of these children and the decline of it. In fact, they remain largely descriptive and theoretical, and there are no operational strategies to improve social support.