Current study aimed to continue previous studies on family caregiving and to expand and verify a previously developed family caregiving theory. This application is for the 2nd and 3rd year research project.

     The purpose of this study was to expand the role-tuning model to develop a substantive theory for explaining the longitudinal changes in caregiving process of families of children with autism in Taiwan. By doing so, developmental and relational contextual variables will be identified to enrich the “role tuning”theory in explaining family care phenomena in Taiwan.

     Grounded theory method is selected over other methods due to the reason that grounded theory method is particularly established to serve the purpose of developing/extending an empirically grounded conceptual framework. Face-to-face interviews with participant observations will be used to collect the data. All the interviews will be tape recorded and then transcribed verbatim. Based on the concepts developed previously in the role tuning model, the initial theoretical sampling will include families who of children with different developmental stage and who are past diagnosed, identified as having stresses and conflicts or are in stable condition. At least four families from each site including the clinics, day care and parent support group will be recruited and followed every 6 months for two year in order to maximize the variability and to catch the longitudinal changes of the phenomena. Current project has proceeded for 5 months. During this 5 month-period, investigators have participated in out patient clinic, day care and parent support groups to engage in the field. A total of 11 families agreed to participate and is in the process of data collection, transcription and analysis.We expect to finish interviewing and analyzing data from fist interviews with 12 families by July 2005 and completing all of the interviews and analyzing by July 2007. Constant comparative strategy will be used to analyze the data. Audit trails, peer debriefing, triangulation, prolonged engagement, thick data with theoretical sampling, and member checks will help to increase the overall trustworthiness of the study.