Impact of supports and partnership on family quality of life.
Strong family-professional partnership is as powerful as extra services for raising family quality of life.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Durbin et al. (2019) asked the families with kids who have intellectual or developmental delays.
They used a survey to measure how happy families were with early-intervention supports and how strong their partnership felt with professionals.
Then they checked if these two things predicted overall family quality of life.
What they found
Families who rated their supports as good AND felt true partnership with staff scored highest on quality-of-life scales.
The partnership quality mattered just as much as having enough services.
How this fits with other research
Manor-Binyamini et al. (2021) flipped the story with Bedouin mothers. In that group, low quality of life and high stigma hurt collaboration with professionals. This shows the link runs two-way: poor life quality can weaken partnership, not just the other way around.
Fäldt et al. (2024) widened the lens to parents of preschoolers still waiting for a diagnosis. These families felt as stressed as those with confirmed delays, backing the call to start strong partnerships before labels arrive.
Sutton et al. (2022) echoed the same needs in Ghana: parents want both formal services and informal support like church groups. Together the studies say the recipe for better family life is the same across cultures—good supports plus real teamwork.
Why it matters
You can have the best therapy plan, but if the family feels like a bystander, their life won’t improve. Ask parents to rate the partnership at every review. Use their answers to adjust how you share goals, schedule visits, and celebrate wins.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: In recent decades, Family Quality of Life (FQOL) has emerged as a decisive construct, both to improve the living conditions of the families of people with disabilities and to assess the results on the services and supports that they receive. The aim of this research is to determine the perception of the families regarding their support needs, the quality of their partnerships with professionals, and their FQOL and then identify to what extent the supports of early childhood intervention centers have a positive impact on the families' FQOL while exploring whether the family-professional partnership has become a fundamental intervening factor of FQOL. METHOD: The participants were 202 families with children aged 0-6 with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We used the structural equation model to analyze the influence that the adequacy of the supports and the partnerships exerted on FQOL. RESULTS: The results indicate that the families have language and speech support needs for their children and information needs for themselves, and that they are mostly satisfied with their partnerships with the professionals and their FQOL. Our results also indicate that their degree of satisfaction with the support was a good predictor of FQOL and their ratings of partnership quality was a key factor interceding on this effect. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides professionals and public institutions with guidance when designing plans to improve early childhood intervention centers so the quality of life of these families and the progress of children with disabilities living in Spain become progressively stronger.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2019 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2018.10.006