Participants in this group were administered the pre-intervention introductory information form, The Parental Self-Efficacy Scale, the Zarit Care Burden Scale, the Perceived Stress Scale and the Family Empowerment Scale. Then, a group empowerment training program consisting of four sessions in total was applied to the participants. Two motivational interview sessions were conducted with each participant in the intervention group 10 days after the empowerment training program. One month after the motivational interview sessions were completed, post-test data were collected.

No intervention was applied to the control group. The data collection tools applied to the intervention group in the pre-test and post-test were also applied to the control group.

The empowerment program consisted of two parts: the empowerment training program for parents and motivational interviews.

The empowerment training program was prepared to enable parents to carry out the care process more effectively in areas where parents have difficulties caring for their children with autism. Within the scope of the empowerment training program, parents were trained on the importance of play and communication, problems and management in the field of nutrition, sleep problems and management, safety and protection from accidents, and problems and management in the field of self-care.

Ten days after the empowerment training program, two face-to-face motivational interviews were conducted with each participant in the intervention group. Each participant had a one-week break between the first and second motivational interviews. Each motivational interview session lasted approximately 25-30 minutes.

The scale was developed by Guimond et al. (2005) to measure the self-efficacy of parents of children with disabilities regarding parenting skills (Guimond et al., 2005). The Turkish adaptation of the scale was first made by Diken (2007) and then by Cavkaytar et al. (2014) (Cavkaytar et al., 2014; Diken, 2007). The Parental Self-Efficacy Scale is a seven-point Likert-type rating scale consisting of 17 items. The lowest and highest values that can be taken from the scale are 17 and 119. Higher scores indicate higher self-efficacy perceptions. The Cronbach Alpha internal consistency coefficient value of the scale was calculated as 0.95 (Cavkaytar et al., 2014). The Cronbach's Alpha internal consistency coefficient value of the scale in this study is 0.96.

The Zarit Care Burden Scale was developed by Zarit et al. in 1980 and adapted to Turkish by Inci and Erdem (2006). The scale is a 22-item, five-point Likert-type scale used to evaluate the stress experienced by caregivers of individuals in need of care. A minimum score of 0 and a maximum score of 88 can be obtained from the scale. The higher the score obtained from the scale, the higher the care burden felt. The Cronbach's Alpha internal consistency coefficient value of the scale was found to be 0.75 in the original study (Inci and Erdem, 2006; Zarit et al., 1980) and 0.89 in this study.

The Perceived Stress Scale was developed by Cohen et al. (1983) and adapted into Turkish by Eskin et al. This 14-item, five-point Likert-type scale has two sub-dimensions: inadequate self-efficacy perception and stress/discomfort perception. Higher scores indicate higher levels of perceived stress. The Cronbach's alpha internal consistency coefficient for the entire scale was 0.90, with the sub-dimensions scoring 0.86 and 0.83, respectively (Cohen et al., 1983; Eskin et al., 2013). In this study, the Cronbach's alpha internal consistency coefficient was found to be 0.75 for the overall scale and 0.73 and 0.75 for the sub-dimensions, respectively.