Purpose: The family plays the most effective and important role in the development and education of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It is important that the family, especially the mothers are knowledgeable about their child’s disability. This study aims to examine the knowledge levels of mothers who have children diagnosed with ASD.
Method: 54 mothers who have children between 3-6 years of age and diagnosed with ASD filled out two questionnaires: a) Sociodemographic Form where they provided information about their age, gender, their education level, income level, whether their children received therapy or from which occupational groups they received therapy, and b) Autism Information Questionnaire (AIQ). AIQ is a 33-item questionnaire prepared by researchers by scanning the literature and designed to measure the level of ASD knowledge of the mothers. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the results.
Results: It was observed that the accuracy rate of the participants to the questions in the AIQ was 76.94%. When the mothers' AIQ scores were analyzed according to sociodemographic characteristics, significant differences were obtained. It was observed that the correct answers in the AIQ of the participants who read a book about autism (p = .013) and who watched a movie/documentary about autism (p = .003) were higher and statistically significant. Similarly, the correct answers in AIQ of families who knew the term of ASD before diagnosis (p = .006) and had a university degree or higher education level (p = .001) were also higher and statistically significant. Also, the correct answers in AIQ of families whose children started to receive therapy within the first 0-6 months after the diagnosis of ASD were statistically higher and significant than mothers whose children started therapy after 6 months (p = .035). Similarly, answers of the mothers who noticed the difference in their child in the 0-18-month period, were found to be statistically different than the mothers who noticed the difference at age of 3 years and later (p = .004).
Conclusion & Recommendations: According to the results of this research, it would be reasonable to suggest that it would be highly beneficial if speech and language therapists offered seminars to mothers and expectant mothers about children's communication, language and speech development. Similarly, it is would be reasonable for experts to examine and improve the number of the resources such as books/films/documentaries that families refer to for information after their children are diagnosed with autism.
Keywords
autism spectrum disorder, autism knowledge level, knowledge of mothers about ASD
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