Structural Pattern Resilience, optimism and life expectancyto post traumatic growth in mothers with autistic spectrumchildren: The mediating role of religious beliefs

Birth and child is associated with pressure and difficulty for the mother, but if this child has a physical or mental disability, it will lead to consequences and reactions. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to investigate the structural pattern of resilience, optimism and life expectancy with posttraumatic growth in mothers with autistic children with the mediating role of religious beliefs.

The present research is of the correlation type. The statistical sample included 225 mothers with autistic children who were selected by purposive and available sampling from educational centers and the Autism Spectrum Children Association in 2019. The tools used in this research were Religious Attitudes Questionnaire (Serajzadeh, 1998), resiliency scale (Conner-Davidson,2003), optimism questionnaire (Scheier-Carrer, 1985), life expectancy Scale (Miller, 1988) and post traumatic growth questionnaire (Tedischi & Calhoun, 1996), and Pearson correlation coefficient, path analysis and bootstrap method were used to analyze the data.

The analysis of the findings showed that the structural model has a good fit and all predictor and mediator variables can predict 0.41 of the dependent variable changes. Thus, religious beliefs mediate the relationship between Resilience and hope and post traumatic growth, but do not mediate the relationship between optimism and post traumatic growth.

According to the findings, it can be said that religious beliefs can mediate the relationship between resilience and life expectancy with post-traumatic growth, but in the relationship between optimism and post-traumatic growth, religious beliefs do not play a mediating role.