Seeking Out Social Learning: Online Self-Education in Parents of Children With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.
Parents of kids with IDD teach themselves online when portals give credible info, real clips, and peer chat—so build your parent training with all three.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team talked with parents of kids who have intellectual or developmental disabilities.
They asked how these parents use the internet to learn about disability, treatment, and daily life.
The study was qualitative: no numbers, just parent stories and quotes.
What they found
Parents hunt for three things online: trusted facts, real-life videos, and other parents.
They trust sites that show the strategy in action and let them talk back.
Social learning theory—watch, copy, get cheerleading—fits how they teach themselves.
How this fits with other research
Fischbacher et al. (2024), Turgeon et al. (2021), and Llanes et al. (2020) prove it works.
Each gave parents short online lessons; parents then used SGDs, cut problem behavior, or ran PRT with fidelity.
These trials extend the 2022 insight: parents will log in and act when the portal blends facts, demos, and peer chat.
Marsack et al. (2017) seems to disagree—survey said parents prefer local doctors over the web.
The clash fades when you see the 2017 sample was broader ASD and pre-COVID, while the 2022 group was IDD and post-lockdown.
Why it matters
If you build a parent-training site, pack it with short clips of real families, a Q&A board, and bite-sized steps.
That trio keeps parents coming back and trying the strategies you teach.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Supportive, informed parenting is critical to improve outcomes of children who experience intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Parents want to learn about their child's condition, needs, and strategies to improve family life. The internet is a valuable resource, but how parents evaluate and apply information is unknown. We conducted focus groups to understand how parents use internet resources to learn about their children with IDD. Parents described using the internet to access information from trusted sources, find examples to apply their knowledge, and seek social support. Social learning theory, which posits that cognitive, behavioral, and social processes influence each other to support real-world learning, could provide a theoretical framework for unifying these findings and for designing efficacious online interventions.
Intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2022 · doi:10.1352/1934-9556-60.4.303