ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a number of methods used to study families of handicapped children in terms of their potential to describe individual differences, environmental process, and the roles of various family members and the separation of behaviour from attitudes. Research on the parents focuses on changing reactions to various stages of development and characteristics of the child, rather than on individual motherhood or fatherhood per se. Research strategies have frequently concentrated only on one family member and on one-way effects. The family as a system or functional unit, within which individuals exert reciprocal influences on each other, has rarely been studied. Greater detail of family organisation was studied by Farber, who then distinguished different ways in which families responded to the discovery that their child was handicapped. However, the present shift toward multimodal research strategies represents more than simply adding data from two or three methods together as cross validation.
