Understanding the lived experience of fathers with children with disabilities: An interpretive phenomenological study

Abstract

Having disabled child among family, has heavy mental and social burden on this family. father who is the head of the family and as direct responsible, feels this burden some more than others. The aim of this study is understanding the lived experience of fathers with mentally disabled children with qualitative method and relying on interpretive phenomenology and its important theorists such as: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Penty, Schutz, Foucault, Bourdieu and Van Manen. Sampling procedure is an aimed sampling which careful interviews with twenty fathers who had disabled child and were under supporting of welfare department in the city by supposing criteria such as wing with disabled child at home , satisfied with being interviewed and other criteria ware conducted. The data ware analyzed based on double hermeneutics and the participants textual descriptions transformed into structural descriptions. The results led to recognizing of central category named responsibility of father having disabled child and three main contents inclined responsibility to persons, family and society. The findings consisted of negative individual experience , psychological and mental injuries including stress, anxiety, depression, life Satiety, family experience such as having inappropriate relationship with wife and children, being children with together, social experience including stigma, social exclusion and isolation, heavy pressure of Finance and economy. Attention to the lived experience of fathers instead of mothers was an important innovation of this research. The result was that the interaction of all times with each other requires the pressure of the father's burden of support and attention

Keywords

• interpretive phenomenology
• fathers with disabled child
• mentally disabled
• life experiences
• welfare department