THE RELATION BETWEEN FAMILY FACTORS AND THE BEHAVIOR OF CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES: EMPOWERMENT AND AFFILIATE STIGMA AS MODERATORS

Aurora H. Brinkman

doi:10.7273/000007027

Children with disabilities require a higher level of care and resources than children without disabilities. These additional needs make it particularly difficult for families to care for individuals with disabilities, and greater caregiving responsibilities can lead to higher levels of stress, greater healthcare costs, and increased levels of caregiver psychopathology. Elevated stress can have undesirable effects on a family including increased child behavioral problems and higher parental expressed emotion. Family members of individuals with disabilities may experience affiliate stigma, which is the internalization of public stigma by family members who are associated with individuals belonging to stigmatized groups. Individuals experiencing affiliate stigma often have lower self-esteem and less self-efficacy in addition to psychopathologies such as anxiety and depression. In contrast, empowerment is the process of having control and power in one’s environment. Families experiencing higher levels of empowerment tend to have better outcomes including higher utilization of and greater benefit from services, greater parental acceptance, and better quality of life. Prior research has examined empowerment and stigma separately as moderators in studies concerning individuals with disabilities and their families. However, no known studies have investigated affiliate stigma and empowerment in the same sample. The current study addressed this gap by investigating the moderating potential of caregiver affiliate stigma and family empowerment in the relation between family factors (caregiver behavior, caregiver distress, family social support, and caregiver expressed emotion) and child behavior (internalizing and externalizing). Sixty-seven caregivers of children with disabilities (aged 6 to 21 years) completed an online Qualtrics survey assessing the aforementioned study variables. Findings suggest that families with children with disabilities who experience higher levels of affiliate stigma have a greater presence of negative experiences including caregiver distress, caregiver expressed emotion (criticism and EOI), and child behavioral problems (internalizing and externalizing). Further, the results indicated family empowerment is an important, albeit less robust, construct to consider when working with families with children with disabilities. Family empowerment significantly, negatively related to caregiver affiliate stigma and expressed emotion (criticism and EOI) and had a trending negative relation with caregiver distress. As such, decreasing caregiver affiliate stigma and increasing family empowerment may be vital areas of intervention when working in a clinical setting with children with disabilities and their families. Results from the current study addressed gaps in the research concerning families with children with disabilities and will inform interventions to address the negative effects of caregiver affiliate stigma and increase the use of family empowerment as a positive intervention tool.

THE RELATION BETWEEN FAMILY FACTORS AND THE BEHAVIOR OF CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES: EMPOWERMENT AND AFFILIATE STIGMA AS MODERATORS

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