SOC W6301 Week 9 Assignment Research Proposal Part 1

SOC W6301 Week 9 Assignment Research Proposal Part 1

 

Student name

SOCW6301

Walden University

Professor Name

Submission Date

 

Research Proposal Part 1

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is one of the complex disorders of development that interferes with the way individuals communicate, interact, and behave. It has a very diverse range of symptoms and challenges that extend to both simple social issues and serious losses of communication and behavior. ASD is an issue of increasing relevance in the professional sphere, including social work, where specialists are tasked to provide care to people and families with autism.

The actions social workers take to support the concept of early intervention, encourage access to resources, and develop sweeping policies that should be designed with the educational, interpersonal, and health concerns of people living on the spectrum will be critical. In particular, given the heterogeneous manifestation of ASD symptomology, there is also an immediate need for a specific intervention and a study that enlightens best practices in culturally competent service provision.

Problem Statement

This research proposal aims at addressing the existing gap in the best practices in parent education that will lead to increased developmental potential of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the future. Parents, in this case, when their children become young adults, have another challenge of seeking appropriate people who can replace them in providing care to their children.

This is much more alarming to the ageing parents who may lack sufficient support or funds to spare. Although the social workers view that they enable the families through this transition, no studies were conducted on how effective education strategies could be applied to the effective future development of persons with ASD. This field should be explored with the view of coming up with effective strategies to enhance the future of ASD people and their families.

Research Question

How far do parent education strategies augment the quality of future development of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)?

Literature Review

In the case of children with ASD, the most significant need is that the parents should be educated to enable them be in a position to observe and respond to their developmental needs. The demands of ASD imposed on individuals tend to necessitate a special sort of integration, and the best coordination between parents, educationists, and healthcare givers. On their part, Roquette Viana et al. (2021) and other writers suggest that parents with a better understanding of the needs of the children will also have a more active role in development.

Cohen and Mosek (2019) believe that there should be collaboration between parents and professionals in ensuring that proper environments are arranged for a child with ASD. Their qualitative research is based on how partnerships between therapists and parents can be used to result in better therapies in a positive way. Such a view is also present in the works of Dababnah and Parish (2016), who talk about the support programs in the form of fixed structures, including Incredible Years, which involved parents. They also found out that these programs ease stress reduction in parents and also enhance the regulation of emotions in the members of the family.

The intervention process should also include the parents, since the parents would always follow up and support the learning and behaviour-changing methods provided to the child by the specialized personnel. The literature has covered different methods of educating the parents of children with ASD. In particular, Dijkstra-de Neijs et al. (2023) conducted a systematic review of play-based interventions and the results found that such strategies are helpful in the development of children.

The involved parents were more assured of the way to attend to the developmental needs of their children because of the programs in which they participated. Moreover, Schweizer et al. (2019) concentrate on art therapy, in particular, its use in children with communication disorders. Their study found that creative therapies, such as sign language, may enhance the knowledge of a child about wants and feelings. These learning methods will help parents to be increasingly aware of the enhanced social and emotional health of their children, towards the advancement that is bound to occur in the future.

The other aspect of concern recorded in the literature and the possible application of education to alleviate stress among parents of children with ASD is school-related stress. Dababnah and Parish (2016) suggest that parent-centred interventions can be highly helpful in reducing stress that subsequently leads to desirable family changes.

Cohen and Mosek (2019) expound that such cooperation involving parents and professionals lessens the burden that cannot be shouldered by parents as they seek to handle their children. Parents who are informed can adopt such strategies and apply them to minimize the level of stress they experience, and consequently, it has the potential to positively affect the development of parents and children.

Although noticeable progress has been recorded in capturing the literature on the positive effects of parental education, certain gaps in research remain in recording the long-term efficacy involving the interventions of the different interventions. As Deb et al. (2020) observe, the majority of these works do not provide the long-term impacts of such programs and do not give an indication of the continuation of such programs in the future.

Furthermore, a considerable amount of literature is dedicated to some types of interventions, such as clinically oriented parental support groups or play-based therapies, yet many of these articles fail to address the question of the integration of these interventions into a more generic pedagogical practice among parents. The necessity of research regarding how it is possible to combine different forms of intervention to support parents with each other is also mentioned by Lopez-Nieto et al. (2022). These gaps should be addressed to prompt the creation of a holistic paradigm for the education of parents, which consequently could influence the future growth of children with ASD.

Thus, the literature might justify the need to educate parents concerning ASD interventions of the child with ASD and their effects on the overall child and family well-being. These types of interventions may assist the parents to become more useful to their children by participating in the therapeutic process, providing various types of education, and reducing the stress of parents.

Nevertheless, further research is needed to expose the long-term effectiveness of such interventions and the incorporation of such interventions into broader and sustainable parent support strategies. This will be significant ideally because parent education encourages benefits that extend beyond the short-run use by children with ASD and can change their lives as a whole.

Methodological Approach

This study will also suggest the application of qualitative research methodologies in determining the relative effectiveness and viability of different types of parent education on children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the future. This form of research is applicable in the current research study because it can pose questions that can provide the participants and their contextual considerations with an impression of how efficient or inefficient the various interventions in question can be.

It is essential to understand that social work is a research area where human relations and the respective aspects are in the limelight, and the fact that their interactions can be reduced to numbers is not enough (Kuehn and Rohlfing, 2022). In this case example, data collection will be in the form of interviews or discussions during focus groups to gather descriptive data that would assist in the provision of meaning altogether to the way the parents utilize the educational programs and the expectations that they have concerning the progression of their child regarding the program.

The reason behind the use of QM once more is the fact that the research aims at studying the social and emotional dimensions of the involved affected parents in the interventions of ASD. Non-probability quantitative research methods of quantifying the variable and coefficients would not produce the depth that is required in the realization of the parents’ experience with various education plans and strategies (Ikram et al., 2020).

The fact that a qualitative method permits the engagement of many people in the research simultaneously, and the responsiveness of the qualitative approach that enables changing the questions that need to be answered during the interview according to the answers obtained, and does not restrict the degree of interaction with the topic under discussion. Moreover, qualitative research is aligned with the goals of this study since the latter is concerned with the tendencies and such groups as parenting and its influence on the future of a child.

This data, presented in the form of narratives, will give information on how the parents perceive the educational methods taught and the challenges they face in the process. Based on the analysis of the literature, the researcher will adopt an iterative, cyclical process of data analysis to deepen the comprehension of the themes as they change throughout the data collection and analysis process to increase its relevance based on the realities of the participants (Sarker, 2022). The qualitative method thus suits the research question best since the study aims at answering how the strategies developed in the parent education influence the lives of children with ASD and their families.

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