**Author details**

*Quality of Life - Biopsychosocial Perspectives*

external support is less available to them. Also, there is significantly higher percentage of single-parent families (43.1%) among that group than the other two groups. This finding is in accordance with our previous study that confirmed higher divorce rate in families who have child with less severe disability [25]. Less possibility of sharing care and obligations could contribute more pressure and lower life quality for a single parent. In comparison with parents who share efforts together and who get more external support, it seems reasonable to expect that it contributes to their lower level of life

But how could we explain that the parents of a child with severe or moderate disability have fewer divorces rate and experience higher life quality? Do the difficulties of everyday life contribute to them staying together, uniting their efforts, and relying on each other, which they can appreciate as an important part of their

There is a lot of evidence that the age of the disabled person contributes to caregiver burden [26–28]; however, we did not confirm that prolonged and permanent care for the child contributes to lower life quality. It seems that there is a different experience of difficulties of the caregiver in parent-child (even grown-up child) relationships, than in other form of relations between caregivers (family member, but not parent) and adults with disability. Probably they develop some coping strategies and adaptation skills over time that diminishes the potentially negative effect of perennial care to their life quality. Parents with older children could be exhausted, but adapted and skillful, while families with younger children may still struggle with difficulties of acceptance of the child difficulties and the new organi-

Besides the benefits of services, there are still a lot of problems that should be kept in mind during planning and establishing new services. First of all, there is a problem of sustainability of implemented services. That means that the service which had been provided for a while, without permanent support of local community, could be discontinued after the termination of project financial support. It may have impact to diminishing life quality, even to the lower level then before services had implemented. There were no monitoring or evaluations studies of those effects if families that faced with restriction of support on which they

The other risk is that the services have been offered to all who might need them without careful assessment what exactly they need. The diversity of services had not yet been worked out or individualized according to specific family's needs, and they depended more on service providers' personal skills and resources. So, that increases the chances of imposing something that is not suitable (best fit) for service users. Anyway, the availability of support of the services contributes to positive

Most studies have confirmed that quality of life is a multidimensional construct [14, 15, 18, 24, 27]. Therefore, it would be useful to explore mutual influences of objective and subjective factors that play a role in life quality such as parents' age, gender, health condition, attitudes, spiritual beliefs, level of stress, coping strategies, skills, social and family networks, etc. That would be a very helpful information for creating services, as well as for creating criteria to be used for them.

The importance of service evaluation has been highlighted in the last decade in Serbia. This requires the development of standardized and reliable instruments for the evaluation of the effects of services, which can measure specific aspects of the services. This would enable researchers to explore and understand what are the most helpful or effective aspects of service provision. That could provide useful information for researchers and policy makers, as well as for practitioners and

quality. So, when they get some external help, they progress the most.

zation of their life. It seems that each phase has specific challenges.

change much more that that could damage it.

life quality? It should be the explored in future studies.

**214**

service users.

used on.

Tamara Džamonja Ignjatović Faculty of Political Sciences and Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade University, Serbia

\*Address all correspondence to: tamara.dzamonja@gmail.com

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
