Family resilience and parental stress: the effects on marital relationship in the context of a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder
Family resilience and parental stress: the effects on marital relationship in the context of a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder

Summary/Abstract: This study aims to investigate family resilience and parenting stress – in the context of raising a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – and their influence on certain variables specific to marital relationship: dyadic adjustment and dyadic coping. The research included a sample of 100 people (50 women and 50 men) aged between 27 and 53 years (M= 42.8), each of them parents of a child diagnosed with autism. The participants were asked to fill in a series of scales concerning the variables of this study: family resilience, parenting stress, dyadic adjustment and dyadic coping. The results show that dyadic adjustment correlates positively with some subscales of family resilience, but its correlation with parenting stress is negative, while dyadic coping correlates positively with some subscales of family resilience but also with a subscale specific to parenting stress. Furthermore, findings have underscored which subscales of family resilience and parenting stress are predictors for dyadic adjustment and dyadic coping. Moreover the results show that family resilience and parental stress influence dyadic adjustment according to the child’s age. Family resilience and parenting stress may also represent important factors to be explicitly considered within intervention paradigms for the therapy of families with children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum.

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