Family talk around Autistic Spectrum Condition. v1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Explorations of family talk around Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC) before receiving a diagnosis: A discourse analysis
IRAS ID
148323
Contact name
Katie Denman
Contact email
Research summary
The proposed study is interested in examining how families construct the difficulties that a child experiences before a full assessment for an ASC diagnosis has been conducted. The study is taking a social constructionist and systemic stance on ASC by assuming that ASC is constructed within a socio-cultural and family context. The study aims to explore how families make sense of ASC through their own descriptions and how this is moderated within families (how is language ordering families perceptions) and how talk about ASC is used (how language is serving interpersonal functions and seeing language as a form of social action). The study will be qualitative and will involve a family interview approach used by Crix et al. (2012) with eight families. A synthetic discursive approach will be used in the analysis based on Wetherell (2007). Each family will engage in a semi-structured interview to discuss the difficulties experienced with each other with a view to exploring how families define and understand difficulties before a label of ASC has been given, how talk about ASC is done and organised by families and how families introduce and manage broad social discourses around ASC eliciting systemic aspects. Family members will be asked to discuss each question with each other providing more natural discourse from the family. It is anticipated that findings will highlight family explanations for their child or sibling’s difficulties before a medical label has been assigned therefore validating families experiences and widening the possible accounts for ASC. So far, research has focused on parents and children’s constructions of ASC separately and therefore a systemic view of how a whole family construct their ideas, similarly to Crix et al. (2012) work on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Lewis-Morton et al. (2014) work on ADHD, is important to add to the literature.
REC name
South West - Cornwall & Plymouth Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/SW/1025
Date of REC Opinion
8 Aug 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion