Sibling Relationship Quality and Future Planning among Siblings of Adolescents with Developmental Disabilities: A Mixed Methods Approach

Thesis advisor: Penny Hauser-CramThis study involves secondary analysis of data from the Early Intervention Collaborative Study (EICS; Hauser-Cram, Warfield, Shonkoff, & Krauss, 2001), a longitudinal investigation of children with disabilities and their families. Presented is a mixed methods investigation of the relationship between future planning issues and sibling relationship quality when the teen with a disability (DD) was in adolescence (15 and 18 years old). First, future planning issues were examined contemporaneously with sibling relationship quality using hierarchical regression. Second, future planning issues from when the teen with DD was 15 years old were investigated in their relation to change in sibling relationship quality from ages 15 to 18 using lagged OLS regression. Third, qualitative content analysis was used to analyze sibling responses to a series of open-ended questions concerning the future at age 15 (1 question) and age 18 (4 questions). Siblings were asked "what have you learned by living with your brother or sister?" at both time points. In the first set of analyses, discussion of the teen's needs with parents, teen functional skills, sibling gender match, and sibling expectation of future roles were found to significantly relate to sibling relationship cooperation when the teen was 18. Additionally, sibling birth order was related to sibling conflict at age 18. In the second set of analyses, sibling relationship closeness was found to decrease over adolescence and sibling pessimism at age 15 was found to negatively relate this decrease. Finally, in the results for the qualitative analysis, various themes in sibling responses are discussed. More specifically, patterns arose in the change of sibling responses: trends reflecting a decrease in sibling relationship closeness, trends reflecting increasing role asymmetry in the sibling relationship, and trends reflecting sibling development. Future research must further examine the sibling relationship by using a developmental perspective and by taking into account the dynamic nature of sibling roles. The findings support the design of family-based interventions that address future planning explicitly with siblings and parents. Finally, improving the current resources and support for siblings may potentially increase siblings' perception of sibling relationship quality in these sibling pairs.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology