Özet:

The aim of this study is to reveal the level, contributors and resources of marriage satisfaction with the perceptions of parental support of autistic children's parents. For this purpose, a karma method is used in which quantitative and qualitative data are used. The study included 147 parents with autistic children aged 0-6 and 142 parents with normal development in the same age range. The period of marriage for all participants varies between 2-16 years. Quantitative data collected through the Couple Support Scale and the Marriage Life Scale, the analysis of the data used a multi-faceted MANOVA test and regression analysis. Qualitative data was collected through three separate focus group interviews from 9 fathers and 12 mothers and content analysis was carried out. Nicel findings have shown that autistic child parents have a low level of support perceptions from their spouses and marriage satisfaction, compared to normal development of child parents. When compared with the lower dimensions of the equal support perception of the two groups, it has been determined that the perceptions of emotional support, appreciation support and social interest support of autism child parents are lower than the normal child parents, the two groups are not different only in terms of the perception of financial assistance and information support. As well as the meaningful contributors to the marriage satisfaction of autism child mothers are, respectively, emotional support, appreciation support, social interest support and financial assistance and information support; the support to appreciation only in the marriage satisfaction of fathers is a meaningful contributors. Qualitative data was collected through a semi-structured interview form developed by researchers. In quality analyses, marriage satisfaction has appeared as the main topics of marriage satisfaction for both mothers and fathers as "accepting the child's obstacle" and "spending time with each other as a partner", only for mothers as "sharing the child's responsibility", "lating alone by the spouse" and "not being emotionally shared as a partner", and only for fathers as "recognition" and "incomprehension caused by communication problems". The findings show that the psychological support to parents with autism children should be carried out on the basis of the problems that are in front of them. The findings also suggest that it is necessary to investigate what other dynamics the levels of parental marriage and parental support perception may be related to.