Page 37 - Social networks of people with mild intellectual disabilities: characteristics and interventions

Structural and Functional Characteristics
of partner/children, parents, brothers/sisters and other family members); acquaintances (divided into subgroups of friends, colleagues, neighbours and other acquaintances); and professionals.
2. The distribution (i.e. percentages) of the demographic characteristics
(age, civil status, work situation and ID), accessibility, origin of the
relationship and initiation of contact for each of the groups and 2 subgroups of network members. In order to do this, the answers
on the question with respect to the origin of the contact – the only
open-ended question – were coded and clustered into 10 categories,
namely partner, family, other people, school/work, internet, casual
outdoor encounters, sports/clubs, neighbourhood, holiday and other
codes. The assignment of the codes to categories was discussed with
several researchers involved in the research project. In all of these
calculations the scores for each network member were weighted
equally to the score for the total group of network members, so the
number of network members belonging to the subgroup was taken
into account in calculating the scores for the total group of network
members for each participant.
3. Mean scores for each of the groups and subgroups of network members with respect to the frequency of contact, length of the relationship and functional characteristics. In these calculations, each network member was also weighted equally.
In addition, we calculated the mean scores for each of the aforementioned characteristics over the total group of participants for the different groups and subgroups of network members. Obviously, all of the participants were weighted equally here, regardless of the number of network members in the network.
To answer the second research question, the differences between the within-subjects factor ‘groups of network members’ (i.e. three levels: family, acquaintances and professionals) on several structural and functional characteristics were analyzed in a repeated measures ANOVA (GLM). Post hoc pairwise comparisons with a Bonferonni correction were then conducted. If it was unnecessary to compare the three levels, paired sample t-tests were used to compare the means on these structural characteristics. For instance, with respect to length of relationships it was unnecessary to compare acquaintances
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