Study On Family Members’ Intentions To Seek Information For Raising Children With ASD

With the rapid increasing of the number of children with ASD diagnosed in China,more and more families are troubled by the global non curable life-long disease,which is characterized by unclear etiology and mechanism,and lack of specific drugs.Parents or other guardians,as caregivers of autistic children,have a strong demand for information while suffering from huge physical and mental stress in coping with the difficulties.As an active communication activity,information seeking meets caregivers’ information needs for raising autistic children.From the perspective of health communication,the parenting information seeking behavior of parents of autistic children was regraded as object in this study.Based on the theory of planned behavior,the content,channels and sources of information seeking of parents of autistic children were comprehensively analyzed,meanwhile a model was constructed and verified to explain the mechanism that influence family members’ intentions to seek parenting information of autistic children.According to existing authoritative survey and research questions,semi-structured interviews were firstly conducted with 20 caregivers of autistic children from all over the country in order to form a pertinent questionnaire.Then,a total of 424 parents of autistic children,who are from Fuzhou City of Jiangxi Province and Guangzhou City of Guangdong Province,participated in the questionnaire survey.By using quantitative empirical research method,the hypotheses proposed earlier were confirmed in this study finally.All the materials supports sound conclusions that parents of autistic children have urgent needs for parenting information,but the information they can actually seek does not match it,there is a prominent contradiction between supply and demand,the process is the course of change.Caregivers obviously rely on interpersonal communication channels and sources and prefer the Internet and social media.Content,channels and and sources of information seeking of caregivers are varies in their age,education level and their children’s age.On the whole,caregivers are less satisfied with the information content and the seeking channels.Their main motivations to seek information is to making up for the knowledge gap,relieve parental pressure,obtain social identity and emotional comfort.Income level,time investment and their own ability hinder them from carrying out high frequency and long time information seeking.Income,time invested and their own ability would hinder them from seeking parenting information in a high frequency and long time.The study also confirmed that parents’ information satisfaction,media satisfaction and perceived normative beliefs significantly positively predicted their choice of parenting information seeking behavior and priority of parenting information seeking behavior;while their perceived media behavior control significantly positively predicted their choice of parenting information seeking behavior,but not their preference of parenting information seeking behavior.In addition,there are significant differences in information satisfaction,media satisfaction,perceived normative beliefs,perceived media behavior control,choice of parenting information seeking behavior and priority of parenting information seeking behavior among parents of autistic children with different gender,age,children’s age,role,education level,monthly family income and city of residence.This study reveals the role of social psychological factors that influence family members’ intentions to seek information for raising autistic children.The conclusions deepens the theoretical explanation of TPB on health communication and can also optimize supportive communication activities for family members of autistic patients.