REVIEWING BARRIERS TO PARTICIPATION IN RECREATION AREAS AMONG THE FAMILIES HAVING CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Families, the smallest units of the society, are the social groups where we spend most of our lives. Every parent acts with an aim to raise healthy and happy children but some compulsory changes occur in the aims of the parents with the birth of children with health problems; which directly affects many parents’ life standards and ordinary life habits. These effects have been focused on by many scientific researches. This current study aims to review barriers to participation in recreation areas among the families having children with special needs. To this end, 545 parents who were recruited using a suitable non-random sampling method from Mersin Province joined the study. In the study, Scale of Participation Barriers to the Use of Recreation Area –developed by Gümüş and Alay- were used in addition to an Information Request Form as data collection tool. To analyze the data; -in addition to the descriptive statistics- t-test (which is one of the parametric tests) was used to compare averages of two independent groups in the normal distribution while one way variance analysis was used to analyze three or more groups. As the result of the analyses of the data obtained from the study group and their participation in recreation areas; the most important participation barriers and subscales of Scale of Participation Barriers to the Use of Recreation Area were found to be “sports area barrier” (4.01), “individual barrier” (3.34) and “time barrier” (2.89) as follows.