Validation study of a story-based intervention toolkit for parents raising children in conductive education – a second series of studies

Abstract

We conducted a validity study of a three-day story play programme, which encourages parents and can be completed at home. We involved in our study families raising special needs children receiving conductive education. We based our work on the research of Haga (2023) and Szilágyi (2024), who tested the same three-day storytelling program earlier on different families. Our main goal was to expand and support these studies. We sought to answer whether the programme is indeed an appropriate tool for motivating parents, whether it helps create shared experiences between parents and children, whether the program positively affects the parents’ attitude toward spending quality time with their children, and whether the participating pairs succeed in motivating and activating each other during storytelling. Our study included only two parent-child pairs, so due to the low number of cases, we analysed the data quantitatively and drew conclusions from them. Our key finding, based on participant feedback, is that the programme is indeed suitable for encouraging parents and facilitating quality time with their children. However, the initial motivation of parents is very weak, so they need still more support in this area. Our research results contribute to gaining a more relevant understanding of the difficulties and possibilities of parental encouragement, and they offer conclusions for designing a future storytelling program.