The effects of the group guidance program on the couple burnout, occupational burnout and work engagement levels of fathers with children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders*

Purpose: The present study aims to examine to what extent the group guidance program affects the levels of couple burnout, occupational burnout and work engagement of fathers with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Research Methods: In this research, a random pattern with a pre-test post-test control group in a quasi-experimental design was used. The research group of this study consisted of 22 fathers whose children attended the Education Foundation in a provincial center in Central Anatolia and volunteered to participate in the group work. With the random assignment method, 11 fathers were assigned to the experimental group and 11 fathers to the control group. The Couple Burnout Measure-Short Version (CBMS), the Burnout Measure-Short Version (BMS), the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) and the Personal Information Form designed by the researcher were used as the data collection tools in this study. A group guidance program of 10 sessions, once a week for ten weeks, was applied to the experimental group. Shapiro-Wilk test was used in data analysis, and the Levene test was used to test the homogeneity of variances. The pre-test and post-test scores of the fathers in the experimental and control groups were compared with the t-test for dependent and independent groups. Findings: As a result of the analysis of the data, there was a significant difference between pre-test and post-test mean scores of both couple burnout and occupational burnout, while there was no significant difference between work engagement post-test and pre-test mean scores. Implications for Research and Practice: Since it has been determined that the group guidance program is effective in reducing couple and occupational burnout scores of fathers with children with ASD, this program may be useful to be implemented by psychological counselors. In addition, group psychological counseling activities using psychological intervention strategies for parents can be conducted.