Building bridges, empowering families: a leadership program for parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
Makris, Michail-Panagiotis (2024)
2024
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2024103127090
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2024103127090
Tiivistelmä
The current research focused on teaching leadership skills to parents that have children diagnosed with ASD. The study background originated from the dire of need of helping and educating parents to handle effectively the adverse challenges of symbiosis with an individual with ASD and author’s personal interest, after attending a leadership program, to develop a leadership program of educating parents. This study aimed to document parents’ knowledge on different leadership skills such as empathy, collaboration, problem-solving, responsibility, and communication. The second step was to implement the leadership program that includes strategies, workshops, and activities. The final objective was to document the outcome of this program regarding parents’ behavior and the overall effectiveness of this project.
The situation of this study was never conducted before in the Greek context, whereas one team of parents that had children with ASD was the sample, therefore the selected strategy of research was a case study. For the aforementioned reasons, qualitative data method was selected, and the use of partly quantitative data were utilized. Quantitative method was implemented in the form of anonymous parental questionnaire to document and evaluate the knowledge of the parents around leadership skills and how they are handling challenging situations. Moreover, a second survey was administered in the end of the program to evaluate the knowledge that parents acquired and address their overall experience. A semi-structured interview was employed to assess parents existing knowledge and the address the challenges they face in their daily routine.
In this case study, implementing a leadership program to parents that have children with ASD was considered successful. It was found that this leadership program helped parents to trust and include in a more engaging way other family members in the decisionmaking process and felt more confident when they handled stressful and emotional adverse situations. Results have also shown that parents were taught how to establish communication with their children by using concise and short sentences. Future research suggestions should expand the sample size to 100 parents and this could strengthen the validity of the findings.
The situation of this study was never conducted before in the Greek context, whereas one team of parents that had children with ASD was the sample, therefore the selected strategy of research was a case study. For the aforementioned reasons, qualitative data method was selected, and the use of partly quantitative data were utilized. Quantitative method was implemented in the form of anonymous parental questionnaire to document and evaluate the knowledge of the parents around leadership skills and how they are handling challenging situations. Moreover, a second survey was administered in the end of the program to evaluate the knowledge that parents acquired and address their overall experience. A semi-structured interview was employed to assess parents existing knowledge and the address the challenges they face in their daily routine.
In this case study, implementing a leadership program to parents that have children with ASD was considered successful. It was found that this leadership program helped parents to trust and include in a more engaging way other family members in the decisionmaking process and felt more confident when they handled stressful and emotional adverse situations. Results have also shown that parents were taught how to establish communication with their children by using concise and short sentences. Future research suggestions should expand the sample size to 100 parents and this could strengthen the validity of the findings.