The Construction of Family Occupations: A Study of Families with Children Who Have Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract

Families are the main caregivers of children who have special needs and are essential in the client-centred occupational therapy practice. They also provide the immediate social and cultural environments of their children who have special needs. A qualitative study of daily experiences and adaptations of 17 families with children who have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is described in this paper. The analysis of interviews with parents revealed that they developed and used strategies to enable their children' occupational competence. Further, whenever parents reported on the success of these strategies, they also described changes in the daily routines of other family members. The interactions between these enabling strategies and the daily routines of family members are presented and discussed in this paper.

A Qualitative Study of Families and Children Possessing Diagnoses of ADHD

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This phenomenological research study replicates R. Segal's (1998) study of 17 Canadian families. The authors interview 17 american families participating in the national support group Children and adults with attention Deficit Disorder, focusing on the challenges they face in rearing children diagnosed with aDHD.

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“…as a replication study, the weaknesses in the present study are similar to those identified by Segal (1998). Our research was based on 17 families with children diagnosed with aDHD and living in urban midwestern United States.…”

“…We used open coding strategies assessing the texts for repeated words, constructs, and patterns among the responses. Strauss and Corbin's (1990) protocol was used as our model, because that is the procedure used by Segal (1998) in her original study. This involved dividing the data into meaningful elements and developing inductive categories, some of which became tentative themes, when concepts represented the consensus of the families in the study (Bereska, 2003).…”

Towards family‐centred practice in paediatric occupational therapy: A review of the literature on parent–therapist collaboration

“…Occupational science involves studying the person as an ‘occupational being’, exploring the nature of occupation (work, play, leisure, self‐maintenance and sleep) and the processes involved in orchestrating daily activities in order to remain healthy, achieve the necessities of life and to obtain satisfaction (Primeau, Clark & Pierce, 1990). Recent studies in this area have been conducted by Primeau (1998) about the nature of parents’ play with their preschool aged children, and Segal (1998) about daily routines and occupations of mothers of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. These authors have provided insights about how parents organise and combine household work, play and self‐care activities, which may be valuable in developing co‐operative partnerships with parents and planning interventions which are grounded in existing parent and child occupations.…”

This scoping review provides general information, but not robust conclusive evidence about the effectiveness of occupational therapy for people with chronic diseases

“…For the reader it is still unclear what is meant by community‐based occupational therapy. In the literature community‐based occupational therapy is defined as therapy with individuals at home and as an intervention therapy performed for a community (Fransen, Kronenberg, Algado & Sinclair, ; Hebert, Thibeault, Landry, Boisvenu & Laporte, ; Polatajko et al ., ; Segal, ). Results regarding effectiveness from this scoping review are less robust than results from systematic reviews.…”