The experiences and views of autistic children participating in multimodal view-seeking research

Abstract

Autistic children face significant barriers to having their views listened to in research. Inaccessible research encounters and inflexible communication strategies on the part of a research team can prevent opportunities for children to engage meaningfully in the research. Researchers must strive to offer opportunities for meaningful self-expression, and improve the way they seek autistic children's points of view. This article explores ways to engage with, and listen to, the views of autistic children in schoolbased research contexts. Twelve autistic children took part in viewseeking research about their school and playground environment, and reflected on their experience of taking part in the research. The children contributed their ideas through walking tours, photography, LEGO ® models, and interviews with the researcher and their peers. The multimodal qualitative data were analysed iteratively and thematically, with findings highlighting issues of perceptions of audience, creativity, control and enjoyment. The different research activities stimulated diverse modes of expression and generated different kinds of insights. Implications are considered for how researchers can seek to creatively codevelop engagement and opportunities for self-expression with children who participate in research. This research emphasizes the importance of creating accessible and meaningful opportunities to engage with and foreground autistic children's perspectives.

Factors Affecting Autistic Students’ School Motivation

“…To further strengthen the methodological design by reducing the participation barriers and promoting authentic neuro-divergent engagement from participants, recommendations from the Person-Oriented Autism Research Ethics [38] task force were followed, including (a) individualization; (b) an acknowledgment of the lived world; (c) respect for holistic personhood; (e) empowerment in decision-making; and (e) a focus on researcherparticipant relationships. The practical implementation of these recommendations meant that participants completed the survey online using Qualtrics, which aligns with research that states that autistic people prefer electronic communication over other forms [30,39], especially when interacting with unfamiliar people [40]. To support comprehension, survey items were paired with a simple graphic [30], participants could access familiar supports if required [41], and a completion bar was included at the bottom of each page to inform participants of their progress visually.…”

“…The practical implementation of these recommendations meant that participants completed the survey online using Qualtrics, which aligns with research that states that autistic people prefer electronic communication over other forms [30,39], especially when interacting with unfamiliar people [40]. To support comprehension, survey items were paired with a simple graphic [30], participants could access familiar supports if required [41], and a completion bar was included at the bottom of each page to inform participants of their progress visually. Further benefits of the online survey are that participants did not have to navigate unfamiliar people and environments or rely on speaking forms of communication to participate.…”

“…According to Canada's Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS 2, 2018), participants aged 14-17 qualify as mature minors and can be provided with an adult/participant consent form if they possess decisionmaking capacity. Aligning with these federal recommendations and guidelines from autistic researchers and advocates on non-ableist ways to elicit the views of autistic students, autistic participants were viewed from a strength-based lens with presumed competence [30] and, therefore, if they met the study's eligibility criteria, were considered to possess decisionmaking capacity to provide consent; therefore, parental consent was not required. However, participants and parents were provided information booklets describing the research, eligibility, participation requirements, participation risks, benefits, and contact information for mental health support should they require it.…”

“…However, feeling understood by others depends on multiple experiences of meaningful social connections, which can be difficult for autistic people because of unusual interests and behaviors, communication barriers, and the misperceptions of social interests [48]. Further complicating instances of peer understanding are communication errors and social "breakdowns" that prevent autistic students from feeling equal to their peers [30]. However, autistic advocates have challenged neurotypical norms on appropriate social communication, suggesting that this issue is not one-sided but, instead, the consequence of mutual misunderstandings, which has been named the "double empathy problem" by autistic scholar Damian Milton [49].…”

La representación de la aprobación de la ley TEA: un análisis multimodal de las noticias en periódicos digitales chilenos

“…El TEA se define como una agrupación de afecciones vinculadas al desarrollo del cerebro, las cuales tienden a impactar negativamente en las habilidades sociales y comunicativas (Organización Mundial de la Salud, 2022). La multimodalidad en relación con el TEA se ha estudiado en temáticas tales como su uso en posibles tratamientos terapéuticos (Guzmán et al, 2017), su ayuda en incentivar la participación en investigaciones de sujetos TEA (Scott-Barrett et al, 2022;Warren et al, 2021) y la manera en la que las personas autistas se expresan multimodalmente (Brady et al, 2015;Murillo et al, 2021). No obstante, rara vez se ha utilizado el análisis multimodal para visualizar cómo se representa el trastorno en los medios de prensa.…”