Research InformationEmotional communication in support groups for siblings of children with disabilities
Introduction
Growing up with a child with a disability is related to slightly increased risk of psychological difficulties and less resilience in healthy siblings [1]. Siblings report to have difficult emotional experiences and to try to cope without the support from others [2].
Research indicates that support groups may prevent psychological maladjustment in siblings [3]. Providing them with opportunities to share experience, express emotion, gain attention, and feel support are often described as the means to achieve this goal [e.g.,4].
Children often express emotion in subtle ways [5], and their ability to express emotions verbally is related to age [6] and gender [7]. Support groups have been found to provide possibilities to ventilate negative emotions (NE) [8], but there is little research on how children express NE in support groups.
Adult behavior may provide or reduce opportunities for further disclosure of children’s emotional experiences [6]. The importance of adult conversation partners’ paying attention to, adjust to and validate children’s emotions is well described in literature [9], but how group leaders (GL) respond when emotions are expressed during group sessions is unknown.
Pro social behavior (i.e., comforting, cooperative, helping, and sharing behavior) between children could be difficult for adults to observe as it may be subtle, and adult presence may reduce its frequency [10]. Healthy siblings have been described as more emphatic and caring compared to peers [11], but how they respond to NE of peers during support groups has not been investigated systematically.
This study aims to provide new knowledge about emotional communication in support groups for children and answer the following questions: 1) How frequent, and how explicit do children express NE in support groups? 2) How do children and GL respond to expressions of negative emotions in support groups?
Section snippets
Methods
Siblings (aged 4–18 years) of children with a disability were recruited during family residential courses a Norwegian resource center. IRB approval was obtained. Families were provided written and verbal information about the study. Consenting families completed a consent form and a demographic questionnaire. Of the 104 families approached 80 (77%) consented.
For the purpose of this study children aged 11 years or older (n = 30) were selected to reduce developmental variation. The participants
Results
All participants expressed negative emotions during sessions. In total 235 expressions of negative emotion were identified, 59% as cues and 41% as concerns. The amount of NE expressed varied between participants. The frequency of cues ranged from 0 to17 (M 4.58, SD 4.47).The frequency of concerns ranged from 0 to 7 (M 3.16, SD 1.68). No relations to child age or gender were found.
The immediate response to a child’s NE was almost always provided by the group leader (98%). Children responded
Discussion
This study showed that children express negative emotions during support groups, which are in line with previous research [8]. However, where previous studies have found children to mainly express emotions in implicit ways [5] a high ratio of explicit concerns was observed in this study. The study did show individual variation in the amount of expressed emotions, but as age and gender could not explain this variation, it is possible that factors not included in this study were involved. The
Conflicts of interest
None.
Funding
This research did not receive any special grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Acknowledgements
We thank all the participants, group leaders and project assistants for giving their time to this study.
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