Hello and welcome to the site. In this blog we will update you on minor and major project milestones in relation to data collection, findings, and dissemination, including summaries from meetings with our advisory boards and steering groups.
This blog post will introduce the first steps in our project which started in July 2023.
As a first step common to many projects, we have been doing a review of existing literature on focused interests, communication, and social media. We have found that engaging with interests can lead to positive outcomes, such as decreasing feelings of anxiety, building connections with others, and developing communication skills. For example, Wood (2018) found that schoolchildren spoke for longer and were more likely to initiate conversations with others about their specific interests. However, much research into focused interests and communication has concentrated on young children and face-to-face interactions in classroom contexts. In this project, we want to shift the focus towards young people and online communication.
This literature review has informed our survey, which we plan to distribute to young people (aged 16-26). In this survey, we will ask participants about their social media usage around focused interests. This is the first step in our data collection process and will enable us to capture the types of platforms and activities that young people prefer and regularly use. Following this, we will invite survey participants to the second stage of research, which will involve interviews and observation of online activities.
This research project employs participatory research methods, meaning that academics and members of the community work together to produce meaningful research. This approach recognises the different types of expertise people can bring to a project, including insights from lived experience. Our team includes autistic researchers, professionals, and young people as members of our steering group. We will work with our steering group at each stage of the project: from initial planning, to collecting and analysing the data, to writing up our findings.
Over the course of the project, we will continue to provide updates on our blog. In our upcoming blog posts, we will share some of the discussions that shaped our steering group meetings.
References:
- Wood, R. (2018). Autism, intense interests and support in school: From wasted efforts to shared understandings. Educational Review, 73(1), 34-54. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2019.1566213
