Online parental accounts regarding a multimodal intervention for neurobehavioral disorders : A qualitative descriptive study

ABSTRACT The purpose of this qualitative inquiry was to describe parents’ experiences of the Brain Balance Program, as revealed in their online writing. This study provides a description of parents’ experiences in a way that highlights what participating in the program was like, asserts their judgements about this program, describes the impact of the program on the parent and child and describes the parents’ motives for doing the program and motives for writing about the experience. Six online documents were chosen that were information rich and showed a maximum variation of viewpoints. The sample of online documents were written by parents and retrieved from online sources in November, 2012. Basic Qualitative Descriptive research (Merriam, 2009) was used to design the study and qualitative content analysis was used to produce the findings. Content analysis is “a research method for the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through systematic classification process of coding and identifying themes or patterns” (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005, p. 1278). The findings provide a thick description of parents’ perspectives on their experience of helping their child through a multimodal program for neurobehavioral disorders. Limitations, implications and areas of future research pertaining to the study are discussed. This study can inform parents’ decision making around interventions and provides support for further research in biomedical and cognitive rehabilitative approaches for neurobehavioral disorders