Parental anxiety and quality of life in children with blindness in Ababasire institution

Abstract

Background: Nowadays, quality of life is one of the important aspects in programming and giving service to disabled people and blindness is one of the most important and common kinds of physical handicaps. COS parents have a great role in a child's life, their psychological status can affect their disabled children's quality of life. Anxiety is the most common psychological disorder in parents of disabled children. The goal of this research was to determine relation between parental anxiety and blind children's quality of life in Ababasire institution, Isfahan, in both emotional and social dimensions.

Methods: This was a correlative study and its subjects were selected with census method; 94 blind child and their parents were selected. Data gathering was done with two questionnaires. The standard one was ";Hamilton Anxious Questionnaire";. The other one was ";Quality of life"; that measures two domains including emotional and social. Validity and reliability was assessed with content validity and test-re-test method, respectively (0.89). Data was analyzed using SPSS, and statistical tests including the Kendall's tau b.

Results: There were significant correlative between parental anxiety and blind children's quality of life in both emotional and social domains (p < 0.01). Quality of life significantly decreased with increased level of parental anxiety.

Discussion: In respect to above results, upgrading mental health and reducing anxiety in parents of blind children is really necessary and some effective actions must be done about this.

KEY WORDS: Parental anxiety; quality of life; blind, emotional domain, social domain.