**10. Conclusions**

Parents in most countries realise their important role in supporting themselves and their children despite financial constraints and changing ideologies [19] but in practice in the developing societies, their role is not clearly defined and their presence is not welcomed by clinicians and professionals. In these societies based on the dominant service provision for children with developmental disabilities, parents themselves preferred to act passively. In the case of ASD in Iran, parents still need to struggle to be trained and confident enough to be acknowledged and valued and to be recognised by the society as an integrated group. If the needs of families of children with ASD are to be met through parental empowerment, it seems that a more co-ordinated and coherent CM is needed. Since such a CM has not yet been developed, the family researchers, especially those who study more complicated families, such as a family of children with ASD, have to choose among the available CMs. The experiences which were mentioned here have also required other conceptual models and it could be argued that they have further validated the researcher's choice of framework in different studies on parental empowerment. The complex nature of empowerment has contributed to the adopted approach.

The nature of the phenomena under investigation urged the researcher to adopt different CMs. As the research went on, it became evident that the adopted CM had some limitations in dealing with aspects of the empowerment process in parents of children with ASD in Iran. In this case the adopted CMs need expansion each time to justify the findings. This expansion should be done with the aid of other conceptual models that are consistent with each other, and could cover conceptual shortcomings. Therefore this chapter could be considered as an attempt to specify a model specific to ASD within a tradition that incorporates social ecology, family functioning and parent empowerment.
