A Descriptive Study to Assess the Level of Stress, Social Support and Life Satisfaction among Parents of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder at Selected Centres in Delhi

Autistic Disorder has been recently recognized as a major epidemic problem found in all racial and ethnic groups and across the socioeconomic continuum. It is considered one of the most complex childhood developmental disabilities that can devastatingly affect children's communication and social abilities. A substantial body of research has uniformly found that parenting a child with Autistic Disorder can disturb the whole family life and result in several economic, social, physical and psychological problems. Therefore, the quality of those parents’ lives is placed in serious jeopardy.

a study to assess the level of stress, social support and life satisfaction among parents of children with ASD.

this study aims to (i) assess the level of stress, social support and life satisfaction, (ii) finding the correlation between level of stress, social support and life satisfaction, and (iii) find out the association between level of stress, social support, life satisfaction with selected variable among parents of children with ASD.

A descriptive research design was used for conducting the study in selected centers at Delhi. Purposive sampling technique was used to collect the sample. The sample consists of 60 parents of children with Autism. Diagnostic assessments were carried out using Perceived stress scale, Multidimensional Scale for perceived Social Support and Life satisfaction Scale.

Parents of children with ASD have moderate stress, moderate social support and a neutral life satisfaction. Social supports play a major role on the relationship between stress and life satisfaction. A significant high positive relationship was found between stress, social support and life satisfaction (p=0.05 level). There is a significant relationship between social supports with age at the onset of autism. And there is also a significant relationship between life satisfactions with family income and type of family.

Social support is related to the cause of stress and life satisfactions of parents. Moderate social support leads to neutral life satisfaction and moderate stress. From the findings we can know that mothers with ASD have more stress level than fathers Parents who have a high income have a good life comparing to parents with low income. Stress is likely to be associated with high social support and a satisfied life satisfaction.