November 20, 1998
A study by researchers at the University of Kansas and elsewhere also revealed trends toward three other positive effects of Parent to Parent involvement, said Betsy Santelli, director of the Parent to Parent Projects for the KU Beach Center on Families and Disability.
Parent to Parent links veteran parents of children with special needs to parents seeking support because of a similar experience in their family.
Santelli said that Parent to Parent involvement tended to help parents feel more socially supported, more able to help their child and more in touch with a reliable ally who understood the situation and could offer emotional support and information.
The data about those three benefits were less clear-cut, however, than data about the first two, said Santelli.
The results will be published next year in the Journal of Early Intervention. The study was conducted from 1993 to 1996. It tapped 140 parents in Vermont, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina and Kansas.
The parents were divided into two groups. Parents in one group immediately started receiving support from a parent of a child with a disability. Parents in the other group had to wait eight weeks.
Four times during the study, both sets of parents filled out a questionnaire measuring their attitudes about their child- and disability-related experiences. The questionnaires were administered just before parent-to-parent matches began, three weeks after, eight weeks after and six months after.
The researchers looked for differences in how parents in the two groups responded to the questionnaires.
The researchers also discovered that the more contacts there were between parents new to the program and their veteran contacts, the more satisfaction, Santelli said.
Telephone surveys with 24 sets of parents in the study revealed that the best matches were between parents whose children had similar disabilities. It also helped if the matched parents had similar personalities, outlooks on disabilities, communication styles and thoughts on parenting.
"We learned that an occasional coordinator thought contacts within a match were happening when they weren't," she said. "This suggests how important follow-up is."
The telephone-survey results were published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology.
The 15 Parent to Parent programs in Kansas are coordinated by a statewide program housed within Families Together in Topeka.
Other researchers on the project besides Santelli were Ann Turnbull, co-director of the Beach Center; Janet Marquis, director of the Research Design and Analysis Unit; and Esther Lerner, programmer/database administrator.