The aim of this study is to investigate the causal relationship between participation of children with disabilities in hippotherapy, parental social support, self-efficacy and parenting efficacy.
In addition, the study subjects were 360 male and female parents of children with disabilities who used a community rehabilitation center located in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. A questionnaire survey was conducted on them directly for sampling, and 312 parents were used as a final study subject after excluding the unreliable data.
Therefore, the following results were obtained after statistically validating and analyzing the response results by the study procedures and methods:
First, this study analyzed the differences between social support, self-efficacy and parenting efficacy according to demographic characteristics of the disabled children who participated in hippotherapy and their parents. As a result, the disable children''s gender, educational background, participation period, participation frequency and participation time and the parents'' age, educational background, profession and income level have a partially positive effect on the social support, self-efficacy and parenting efficacy.
Second, the social support of the parents of disabled children who participated in hippotherapy has a significant effect on self-efficacy. To be more specific, evaluative support, evaluative and informative support and emotional and evaluative support of the parents of disabled children who participated in hippotherapy have a statistically significant effect on task-efficacy, emotional control efficacy and coping efficacy, respectively.
Third, the social support of the parents of disabled children who participated in hippotherapy has a significant effect on parenting-efficacy. To be more specific, evaluative and informative support, evaluative support, informative support, informative, evaluative and material support and material support of the parents of disabled children who participated in hippotherapy have a statistically significant effect on teaching ability, healthy parenting ability, general parenting efficacy, discipline ability and communication, respectively.
Fourth, the self-efficacy of the parents of disabled children who participated in hippotherapy has a significant effect on parenting efficacy. To be more specific,
coping, emotional control and task efficacy, task, task, emotional control and coping efficacy, coping and emotional control efficacy, task, emotional control and coping efficacy and task and coping efficacy of the parents of disabled children who participated in hippotherapy have a statistically significant effect on teaching ability, health parenting ability, general parenting efficacy, discipline ability and communication, respectively.
In particular, a path analysis was conducted to examine the causal relationship between the social support, self-efficacy and parenting efficacy of the parents of disabled children who participated in hippotherapy. As a result, all sub-variables of social support such as emotional, evaluative, material and informative support has a statically significant effect on the self and parenting efficacy, and the self-efficacy has a positively significant effect on the parenting efficacy.
Based on the above results, the concept of social support of the parents of disabled children who participated in hippotherapy provides parents of disabled children with positive emotions such as self-efficacy. It is possible to find the significance of this study in that these parental social support and self-efficacy can provide an opportunity to increase the parenting efficacy which is an important emotion in parenting children with disabilities.