This study involved 77 couples consisting of mothers and fathers of ADHD children from intact, two-parent families. All ADHD children were between 6 and 16 years old and had been evaluated by a Licensed Practicing Psychologist or Medical Doctor. All mothers and fathers completed three questionnaires - the Conners Parent Rating Scales-48 (Conners, 1973), the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976), and a demographic questionnaire.
For purposes of this study, Bell's (1981) child effects model was used as a basis for research. This model, as opposed to an adult effects model, supports the thesis that children contribute to their own socialization by influencing the behavior of their caretakers. Recent research suggests that in most families of ADHD children, the primary contributors to parent-child interactive stress appear to emanate from child characteristics, with parental and environmental characteristics playing an important but secondary role (Barkley, 1981a, 1989; Bell & Harper, 1977; Mash & Johnson, 1990; Schachar et al., 1987).
The literature supports the investigation of the relationship between interparent agreement on the perceptions of their ADHD children's behavior and self reports of marital satisfaction with regards to the variables of age of the child, gender of the child, severity of the child's behavior, and gender of the parent. As predicted, moderate relationships were found between interparent agreement on child behavior and mothers' and fathers' reports of marital satisfaction, although somewhat higher for mothers. The predicted effects of age of the child and rated severity of child behavior were not supported. When assessing the effec~s of gender of the child, parents of ADHD girls reported slightly more agreement and higher marital satisfaction than parents of ADHD boys. Examination of the predicted differences between mothers and fathers showed that mothers perceived their ADHD children's behavior as slightly more severe and reported slightly lower marital satisfaction than did fathers of ADHD children. / Ph. D.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/112537 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Hill, Catharine Abbitt |
| Contributors | Family and Child Development |
| Publisher | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation, Text |
| Format | v, 130 leaves, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 27999845 |
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