Family Quality of Life

Description

• The quality of life of families can be defined by
  • Families’ own perceptions of how their life is going (e.g., feeling optimistic about their child’s future, feeling that they have enough money to make ends meet) or
  • Objective facts about their life (access to health care, sufficient income).
• Family quality of life can be defined broadly, such as access to health care, intrafamilial relationships, and formal and informal supports.
• It can also be defined more narrowly as their satisfaction with everyday routines (i.e., activities and events).
• Another dimension of family quality of life is the competence of the child, which might be considered an associated construct or an integral piece of the family quality of life construct.

Research

• Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, Family Research Program, Faculty Pilot Studies, “Routines-Based Interview to Plan Interventions and Measure Family Quality of Life.” (1 year)
• Hornstein, S., & McWilliam, R. A. (2007, October). Measuring family quality of life in families with children with autism. Poster presented at the 23rd Annual International Conference on Young Children (Division for Early Childhood of CEC), Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
• A Comparison of Home- and Center-Based Intervention Settings for Infants and Toddlers with Hearing Loss: Impact on Family Quality of Life (PI: Anne Marie Tharpe, 2005-2007)
  

Consultation, Training, and Technical Assistance Opportunities

Owing to limited data so far on family quality of life, limited opportunities for CTTO on this topic are available.

Future Directions

• Write results of ASD study.
• Develop DB FaQoL instrument for measuring family quality of life in families with a child with deaf-blindness (in collaboration with TREDS, the Tennessee Deaf-Blind Technical Assistance Project)
• Compare our instrumentation with family quality of life measures developed at the University of Kansas’s Beach Center.