A siblings’ response to growing up in a family that has a child with a disability needs to be understood in their context of their stage of development. Children respond to the events of day-to-day life based on their stage of physical, mental and emotional development. Children learn from their environment and through their relationship with their parents and siblings. The sibling relationship, which is life long, has an important influence on the development of a person’s identity.
In later life, it can be a source of mutual support, depending on the quality of the early relationship. A recent methodological advance to resolve discrepant findings across studies is meta-analysis. This quantitative review strategy is employed to assess factors both substantive and methodological that produce inconsistencies across studies (Schmidt, 1992). Howe (1993) employed a vote-count meta analysis strategy to review 21 studies with control groups or normative reference groups that examined siblings of children with chronic illness.
A vote count meta-analysis is a simple tabulation of studies by their outcomes. Howe concluded that siblings of children with a chronic illness were at higher risk than other children for psychological problems, that neurological conditions produced more negative effects than nonneurological conditions, and that negative effects were most often manifested as internalizing behaviors. Summers, White, and Summers (1994) conducted a vote-count meta-analysis of 13 studies of siblings of children with a chronic illness or an intellectual disability.
These 13 studies were assessed for their methodological quality and research methodology, and study results were categorized as positive, negative, or nonsignificant. These researchers concluded that being the sibling of a child with a disability had both negative and positive consequences, that parent surveys and direct observation generated more negative findings than child self-reports, and that higher quality studies found fewer differences between siblings and comparison samples. Like Howe’s (1993) review of the literature, the Summers et al.
meta-analysis was constrained by the limitations to the vote-count review strategy: no estimation of effect size magnitude, no consideration of sample size, and no mechanism for evaluating systematically the impact of moderator variables. A recent meta-analysis of 25 studies and 79 effect sizes from the literature on the siblings of individuals with intellectual disabilities (Rossiter & Sharpe, 2001) revealed a small negative effect for having a sibling with an intellectual disability that could not be attributed to a publication bias or some other artifact.
This negative effect was most pronounced for measures of psychological functioning, especially depression, and adult reports versus child self reports. This meta-analysis pertains to the siblings of children with a chronic illness. Based on the findings from traditional literature reviews and the vote count meta-analyses, a negative effect was anticipated for having a sibling with a chronic illness. A number of hypotheses based on methodological and substantive issues were then derived.