Conductive Education: Why Parents of Disabled Children Turned To An Alternative System of Care.

D'Eath, Maureen (1996) Conductive Education: Why Parents of Disabled Children Turned To An Alternative System of Care. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

Conductive Education is a form of therapy for children with Cerebral Palsy and other disabilities. Many professional people have serious doubts about its effectiveness yet some parents of children with disabilities vote with their feet in its favour.

This thesis sets out to examine why they did so. The basic hypothesis underlying the thesis is that parents become very frustrated with the quality of provision which they experience from statutory bodies and others and that Conductive Education, on the contrary, provides them with a much more satisfactory and effective form of therapy.

A sub-text of this thesis is to examine the extent to which the parents decision to involve their children in Conductive Education represented a turning a different type of provision as opposed to a turnins a-from the statutory provision.

The thesis proceeds in two sections. The first section comprises of interviews with six parents of children with Cerebral Palsy. This interview section discovers points in the development of the child in which parents experience often extreme difficulties.

The second section of the thesis is a survey of forty-six similarly placed parents designed to ascertain to what extent a larger majority of parents experienced similar kinds of difficulties.

The conclusion is that parents, in fact, turned to Conductive Education because of a perceived inadequacy of and extreme frustration with the quality of professional provision by the statutory authorities. They also, by comparision, perceived Conductive Education to be far more satisfactory in a variety of different ways.
The thesis further establishes that this perception is not a comment on the merits or demerits of Conductive Education as a therapy or educational system, but merely records that parents perceive it to be far better than what is available by having recourse to statutory provision alone.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Subjects:	R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry > Neurology. Diseases of the Nervous System. > Treatment of Diseases of the Nervous System R Medicine > RJ Pediatrics > RJ101 Child Health. Child health services
Divisions:	School of Business > Masters by Research
Depositing User:	SINEAD CORCORAN
Date Deposited:	20 Jul 2010 11:09
Last Modified:	02 Sep 2014 13:26
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/334

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