Needs of Families with Children Who Have a Physical Disability: A Literature Review

Families of children with a physical disability experience a large variety of needs over and above those of families with typically developing children. This study reports the results of a review of the published literature on family needs. A systematic search was conducted in the ERIC, PsycINFO, and PubMed databases from their date of release until December 2011. In addition, reference lists of the assembled articles were examined for relevant literature. Articles were evaluated on study characteristics and family needs; 1823 unique abstracts were screened for eligibility, revealing 69 potentially relevant articles, of which 64 could be retrieved. Analyses of a final selection of 29 articles resulted in a list of 604 family needs (range of 1−36 needs per article), which were clustered and rephrased into 99 unique needs and organized into 14 domains. The results of the review emphasize the variety of needs that these families experience, with "information needs" taking an important place. Our findings may serve as a resource for researchers who are working to develop valid tools to assess needs of families with children with disabilities, and such a tool can be instrumental in tuning the care processes to the individual needs of these families.