| Summary: | 碩士 === 長庚大學 === 護理學研究所 === 94 === This was a cross-sectional and correlational study. The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship among hardiness, social support and quality of life(QOL)for primary caregivers with Autistic preschool children. Subjects consisted of ninety-nine caregivers with Autistic preschool children from three autism associations and two Child Psychiatry Departments in the north of Taiwan. Several structured questionnaires were applied which included caregiver and child characteristics checklists, Social Supportive Scale, Personal Views Survey III-R and WHOQOL-BREF. The data were analyzed using SPSS 10.0 for Windows by the methods of t-test, ANOVA, Pearson correlation and multiple regression.
The major findings of this study was (1)The caregivers with Autistic preschool children had moderate hardiness, social support and QOL. In the four domains of QOL, subjects’ physical health QOL was the best and the psychological QOL was the worst.(2)There was significant positive correlation among hardiness, social support, QOL and four domains of QOL.(3)The significant predictive variables for the quality of life were “hardiness”, “the level of autism symptoms disturbing on the family” and “informative support”. These variables explained 49.3% of the variance in caregiver’s QOL. The predictors of physical health domain were “hardiness”, “religion” and “the level of autism symptoms disturbing on the family”. These three variables accounted for 31.5% of total variance. The predictors of psychological domain were “hardiness” and “the level of autism symptoms disturbing on the family”. Forty-one point two percent of variance was explained by these two variance. While the predictors of social relationships domain were “hardiness” , “emotional support” and “receiving service from social welfare institutions” , the predictors of environment domain were “emotional support” , “hardiness” , “the level of autism symptoms disturbing on the family” and “receiving service from social welfare institutions”. The former explained 46.5% of total variance of social relationships domain and the latter accounted 40.7% of total variance of environment domain.
The results of the study provide nurses not only the understanding of the relationship between autistic preschool children’s caregivers’ hardiness, social support and quality of life, but also the more resources to enhance quality of life for them. Furthermore, the results could make as reference to policy making to promote caregivers’ quality of life in the community.
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