"Growing Up Together Plus" Support Program for Parents of Young Children with Disabilities: Benefits from Parents' Perspective

Information

One of the key elements of the implementation of a carefully designed parenting support program is the collection of data on the achievement of its goals, i.e., the examination of its effectiveness. "Growing Up Together Plus" (Pećnik, Starc, Ljubešić, Jeić, Pribela-Hodap and Grubić, 2014) is a version of the universal parenting support program „Growing Up Together” for parents of preschool children (Pećnik & Starc, 2010) adapted to the needs of parents with a young child with developmental disabilities (CWD). The program consists of 11 weekly, two-hour, structured workshops (supported by a manual, presentations, short films and written materials for parents), designed for groups of 8-12 parents and being facilitated by two trained experts. As an addition to quantitative appraisal of the program effectiveness in a pre-post design framework (Tokić Milaković & Pećnik, 2022), the aim of this study was to examine the parental perceptions of the program outcomes in terms of their personal gains from the participation, as well as perceived gains for their CWD. After completing the set of workshops, parents were asked to answer two open- ended questions: 1. What do you consider the most useful gain from participating in the workshops for yourself?, 2. What do you consider the most useful gain for your CWD? To investigate parents’ perceptions of the program outcomes, qualitative data are being analysed using inductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The identified codes and developed categories are being discussed in terms of providing guidelines to improve the future implementation of the program.

Output type
Conference presentation
Year
2023
Authors
Ana Tokić Milaković
Nika Herceg