The Relationship between Hassles of Adolescent Living with a Sibling with a Developmental Disability and School Maladjustment in South Korea: The Mediation Effect of Depression

Background: Comparing with other advanced countries, studies on adolescent with a sibling with a developmental disability (here in after ASDD) have been limited in South Korea. Until now, the notions have been taken for granted that ASDD is a caretaker who takes care of the daily lives of sibling with a developmental disability (here in after SDD), a helper for parents, and future parents of SDD after death of parents. For ASDD, even at the time of childhood, parents and surroundings often delayed desires of ASDD, asked to silently accept reality and to endure it. However, ASDD is under big hassles now without any other’s interests. If hassles are not resolved by any interventions at an appropriate time, then difficulties of inner-response or behavior problems of maladjustment will continue to adulthood.

Objective: The aims of this article are twofold; first, to explore the situations of hassles of ASDD and school maladjustment; second, to investigate the pathway from hassles to school maladjustment mediated by depression.

Participants and Setting: Total participants were 343 ASDDs (female, 51.9%; male, 47.5%). Regarding ASDD, over 17 years were 41.7%, between 14-16 years were 31.2% and 52.2% answered that their school records were high level. For SDD, males were 62.7%, over 17 years were 37.3%, and 89.5% were reported as severe status of a developmental disability. attending special schools. 47.8% regarded their family socioeconomic status as lower class. The survey was conducted in the year of 2018 and got consents from parents in an advance.

Methods: The ways to analyze are twofold; first, to verify pathway from independent variable (X) to dependent variable (Y) by regression analysis; second, to investigate mediation effect by bootstrapping using SPSS Macro 25.0 program. If ‘o’ is not contained between 95% CI, then mediation effect is significant.

Results: First, regarding regression analysis, the path from (X) to (Y) is significant (coeff.=.2116, 95% CI = .1161 to .3072). Among covariates, both school records of ASDD (coeff.=-.0674, 95% CI = -.1063 to -.0286) and socioeconomic status (coeff.=-.0573, 95% CI = -.1045 to -.0101) are sig. Second, the result of mediation effect is follows. Both direct effect (Effect=.1167, 95% CI = .0156 to .2178) and indirect effect (Effect=.0949, 95% CI = .0519 to .1434) are sig.

Conclusions: First, it is presented that hassles of ASDD are high. Hassles are composed of five categories; difficulty of communicate with SDD, worries, troubles of living together, parental inattention, and social discrimination. Among them comm. is the most difficult and social discrimination the least. Researchers are asked to focus on hassles specifically and find ways such as family counsel programs to relieve them. Second, to decrease school maladjustment, school social workers are needed to help ASDD. Third, to diminish the mediating variable, depression, cooperations with school social worker and family counselor are demanded. ASDD is slightly increasing every year, Korean government is also asked to find the way how to help in terms of policy and funding.

Limitations: It is small data that generalizability is difficult.