Parents’ awareness, knowledge, and experiences of play and its benefits in child development: A systematic review protocol

BACKGROUND: Play is an important childhood occupation and a medium for development. Parents’ attitudes towards play, knowledge about play and its benefits, and their experiences in facilitating effective play are key factors that determine the experiences of play in children. These factors related to parent’s understanding and experiences of play gain additional significance when the child has a disability. The aim of this systematic review is to synthesize the available evidence on awareness, knowledge, and experience of play among parents and to summarise the findings. METHOD: MEDLINE, CINAHL, APA PsycINFO, Psychology Database, Sociological Abstracts, EMBASE, and Cochrane Collection Plus will be searched for studies of any design that investigate awareness, knowledge, and experience of play among parents and its benefits to child development. Manual searches from reference lists of relevant papers will also be completed. The primary outcomes are parents’ knowledge (what constitutes play), experiences (what parents feel about play) and awareness (benefits of play) about play. Three independent reviewers will screen identified papers with pre-defined eligibility criteria and extract data using a customized extraction form. Discrepancies will be resolved in discussion with a fourth reviewer. A synthesis of eligible studies and summary will be provided. DISCUSSION: A systematic review of quantitative and qualitative research evidence of parents’ awareness, knowledge, and experiences in play will be carried out. This will highlight parents’ own views on play among their children, current theories/domains related to parents’ awareness, knowledge, and experience in play, and outcome measures that have been used. In addition, comparison among views of parents of children with disabilities and parents of typically developing children will be made. The results will be presented as a summary of key findings under the themes of awareness, knowledge, and experience of parents in play.