The Challenge of Community and Stakeholder Engagement in Qualitative Research on ASD

Conference Information : https://www.autism-insar.org/page/2025_Committee_Events_Calendar

Today, I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Dr. Grinker, which highlighted the critical importance of community engagement in qualitative research. One of the key takeaways for me was how essential it is to involve the community throughout the research process.

During my master's program, while studying statistics, I learned that the quality of a dataset significantly impacts the reliability of results. Dr. Grinker provided an excellent example to emphasize this point. He described an exercise where participants were given cards and asked to write down what they believed to be the most important reason for autism. Starting with about 20 participants, they were then asked in a subsequent phase to rank these reasons by importance. Over time, even with this relatively small sample size, no new reasons for autism emerged. This demonstrated the importance of a well-structured research process—highlighting that the process itself is key, and results are merely the outcome of a robust methodology.

Dr. Grinker also discussed several other thought-provoking topics during the talk, and I look forward to revisiting the session’s records to delve deeper and gain further insights.