Parental Stress, Religious Coping, and Psychological Well-Being among Mothers of Children with Autism

Abstract

Religious coping may be a means for mothers of children with Autism to deal with the responsibilities of caring, which can affect parental stress and psychological well-being. The topical study looked at the relationships between psychological well-being, religious coping, and parental stress of mothers of children with autism. The field employed a quantitative, cross-sectional correlational design. Purposive sampling was utilized to choose 200 mothers of children with ASD from autism rehabilitation facilities in Lahore, Pakistan. The Autism Parenting Stress Index (APSI), Brief COPE, and WHOQOL-BREF were used to gather data. SPSS-v25 was used to perform statistical analysis. The relationships between parental stress, religious coping and psychological well-being were examined using Spearman's rank-order correlation because the research variables did not match normality assumptions. The combined impact of religious coping and parental stress on psychological well-being was also investigated using multiple regression analysis. The aggregation indicated that there was no significant correlation between religious coping and parental stress (rs= −.074, p=.295). Additionally, there was no significant correlation between psychological well-being and parental stress (rs =.029, p =.681) or religious coping (rs =.031, p =.661). The regression model explained 1.4% of the variation in psychological well-being (R²=.014), although it was not statistically significant (F(2, 197) =1.360, p =.259). These results show that there were no statistically evidential correlations between religious coping and PS and psychological well-being in the current sample. The results add to the little body of research on psychological health, religious coping, and parental stress in Pakistani mothers of children with autism.