Visual aids and other strategies make it possible to interview young autistic people with intellectual disability or other communication challenges and to draw out valuable responses for research purposes, researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, reported in May.
The team piloted their flexible interviewing protocol, called Autism Voices, with 33 participants pulled from the longitudinal Pathways in ASD study.
“We hope that our team contributed a first step towards what is now a growing research direction, trying to capture first-person perspectives for autistic youth,” says Mayada Elsabbagh, associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the university, who led the effort. The protocol could also make it easier for minimally verbal autistic youth to participate in studies from which they have traditionally been excluded, yielding better data, she says.
Elsabbagh and her colleagues describe the method and some of its applications in this video:
This article was originally published in Spectrum on August 17, 2022: https://doi.org/10.53053/SEHO4745.
