Caregiver burden and perceived community support as correlates of family quality of life among caregivers of individuals with autism spectrum disorder in Saudi Arabia.

Authors

Ghaniah Ain

Published in

Frontiers in psychology. Volume 17. Pages 1897617. Epub Sep 30, 2026.

Abstract

Families raising a member with autism spectrum disorder face continuing psychological, financial, and logistical demands that can compromise family quality of life, yet Gulf-region evidence on the joint contribution of caregiver burden, perceived support, digital competence, and service accessibility remains scarce. This cross-sectional, exploratory study examined family quality of life and the incremental contribution of these factors among 294 caregivers with complete family-quality-of-life (FQoL) data, drawn from 416 survey respondents caring for an individual with autism spectrum disorder across the five administrative regions of Saudi Arabia between March and April 2026. Participants completed an Arabic questionnaire battery comprising a 25-item family quality of life measure structured on the five Beach Center domains but administered with frequency anchors, together with three measures developed for this study: caregiving difficulties, perceived support from caregiver and online communities, and self-rated digital competence, and a nine-item service accessibility composite. Family quality of life was moderate to good overall (mean = 3.77, standard deviation = 0.30). In hierarchical regression analyses, the final model accounted for 35.7% of the variance in family quality of life within this sample and under this specification. In the primary hierarchical regression model, perceived community support (standardized coefficient = 0.39), caregiver burden (-0.26), and the presence of a comorbid condition (-0.13) were independently associated with family quality of life; the comorbidity association, however, was less robust when professional caregivers were excluded. Self-rated digital competence, service accessibility, household income, educational attainment, and caregiver-reported autism severity were not independently associated with family quality of life once the other variables were included. Family quality of life differed between the mild and moderate caregiver-reported severity groups, but the study provides no reliable evidence concerning the severe group because only 10 participants (3.4%) were so classified, and severity carried no association in the adjusted model. Because the design was cross-sectional, all five composites were developed for this study and none is independently validated, two of them fall below conventional reliability thresholds, and the sample was a non-probability online sample, these findings are exploratory associations that require replication rather than estimates of determinants of family quality of life.

PMID:
42876933
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 15 Oct 2026.

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