Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article is somewhat of a relief. It seems that, when asked, people tend to appreciate the autistic people in their lives. That's a kindness to know, because I and other autistic people I know have often felt burdensome.
This is particularly highlighted when you look into how these poll questions have been asked in the past. Some these questions involve reminding the askee of how much money and time and effort it can take to support an autistic person. Which naturally is neither our fault, nor terribly kind.
Saying "Autism is the costliest health condition in the UK, moreso than cancer, stroke, and heart disease combined, now how do you feel about autistic people?" is like saying, "cats are a lot of money and effort to take care of, and in the end you're not really guaranteed a loving, loveable pet, now do you think people should have cats?" Or perhaps more to the point, "Children cost, on average, about $13,000 a year, they will try your every nerve regularly as long as they live with you, perhaps even after, and make decisions you don't approve of on a regular basis. They may or may not even take care of you when you're old. Now how do you feel about people having kids?"
My point is that phrasing in polls has a lot of falling down points. They actually teach you a significant amount about this if you go for a degree in psychology, because you need to know how to write good questions instead of crap ones like these when setting up an experiment or conducting other forms of research. Replacing a clearly biased and unkind survey with a simple thermometer scale seems like a very small, but probably valuable step to humanizing autistic people (and getting more valid data on how people actually feel about us).
Notably, by the way, if you used this thermometer scale in the US, but instead asked about how people felt about autism rather than autistic people, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the response would be much much more negative. With Autism Speaks basically demonizing the condition as loudly as their millions of dollars allow (which is pretty loud), it ends up being kind of a "love the sinner, hate the sin" thing. Except autistic people didn't choose to be born the way we are, nor should it be stigmatized to be autistic.
A shiny new survey that isn't inherently problematic is a very small step, in my opinion, but perhaps an important one. I can only hope that's true. Public opinion does indeed play into policy change, but even more than that... autistic people have to live on this planet, among everyone else. The less people shun and hate us for existing, the easier that existence is.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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