DEPRESSION IN PARENTS OF CHILDREN WITH INTELLECTUAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES

Abstract

The conducted research aimed to examine the level of depression among parents of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The sample included 100 participants evenly divided into two groups: 50 parents of children with intellectual disabilities and 50 parents of children with autism spectrum disorder. To assess the level of depression, the Depression subscale from the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS) was used. For testing the hypothesis, nonparametric statistics were applied since the results deviated from a normal distribution. To test differences in dichotomous variables such as the child’s gender, age, type of developmental disability, and the parent’s gender, the Mann-Whitney U test was used. For testing differences in polytomous variables (the number of children in the family), the Kruskal-Wallis H test was used. To examine the relationships between variables, Spearman’s correlation coefficient (Spearman’s rho) was used. The study found that the sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, and type of disability) of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities do not affect the level of depression in parents. Characteristics of the family (number of children) and parents (gender) do not affect the occurrence of depression in parents. The research also determined that there is no statistically significant relationship between the level of depression and satisfaction with types of support, as the results showed no correlation. Although there are no statistically significant differences, there are individual differences in relation to the observed variables, which indicates the need for further examination in future research.