Characteristics and Efficacy of Play Therapy Interventions in Visually Impaired Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review Study

Abstract

Background: Visual impairment can hinder achieving developmental markers in children. Various studies have examined the effectiveness of play therapy in children with visual impairment. However, lack of a comprehensive review study that examined the characteristics and overall effectiveness of these interventions, led to conducting of the present study. Objectives: This study aimed to provide strong evidence on the characteristics and efficacy of play therapy interventions in children and adolescents (0-21 years) with visual impairment. Methods: Our literature searching was done with English and Persian keywords obtained from Mesh in the Cochrane, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Magiran, Iran Medex, Iranian Archive for Scientific Documents Center (IASD), Iranian National Library (INL), Google and Google Scholar, until 2020. The selection process of articles was according to PRISMA. Text data was analyzed by convention content analysis. Additionally, the modified Downs and Black Checklist was used to assess the quality of primary studies. Results: From 1763 articles, finally nine were analyzed which met the inclusion criteria. The major findings were presented in the categories of on participants, implementation, measurements, and efficacy of interventions. All subjects were with visual impairment, without severe physical or cognitive impairment. Play interventions were done by children, or with operational children and their caregivers or parents. Play therapy interventions were in two forms of computer/video based game and child-therapist/parent based game, which were conducted in different settings resembling home, school, or sport camp conditions. Data were gathered by observation of researchers and reports of children using different questionnaires. All of the interventions were effective in improving cognitive, visual, physical, communicative and vestibular skills of the children. Conclusions: Despite the comprehensive efficacy of play therapy intervention in children with visual impairment, few studies have been conducted in this field. Considering multi-biases such as missing control of confounders, more high quality standard studies are needed to further evaluate the effectiveness of play therapy in children with visual impairments.