Interesting Autism Research Papers

[davidgillon]

I haven't read much more than the first few pages of either, but there's a couple of autism papers I've seen threads about in twitter in the past couple of days (the second by its author), that really caught my eye as interesting.

Autism, Girls & Keeping it All Inside

TLDR: The way autistic people raised as girls don't outwardly present the classical behavioural markers of autism contributes to under-diagnosis of autism in people raised as girls.

“Autism research is in crisis”: A mixed method study of researcher’s constructions of autistic people and autism research

TLDR: This looks like an epic piece of research into how autism researchers view autistic people. To quote the first author's thread: "To put it politely - the data was a shit show. ... 60% of responses contained dehumanizing, objectifying and stigmatizing attitudes towards autistic people - often portraying autistic people as lacking in complex emotions, agency, uniquely human-traits, community, identity, culture, or warmth. It was stomach churning to read" and "snapshot of results: while controlling for career length, and other contact with autistic people (familial & non-familial), medicalized approachs to autism predicts a significantly higher odds of ableism, while involving autistic people more in research predicts lower odds"

Comments

[hairyears]

I cannot tell you how much I regret telling you that this is entirely unsurprising to me.

And I doubt that any consequences will befall the worst of these researchers in their glittering academic careers...

...Unless some people forward this paper, and some relevant material, to those researchers' ethical review board in their institutions.

There are ethical safeguards on all research where children are the research subjects, and the review board *might* take a stance on their institution collaborating in dehumanisation.

So might their funding body.

[conuly]

This is so shocking. See how shocked I am? I am shocked to the very core.