Parental Constructions of Autism and the Impact of Autism on the Family: A Critical Exploration
Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The majority of research on autism and its impact on the family have been conducted within the positivist paradigm theorising parental (predominantly maternal) experiences in terms of psychological stress mediated by coping strategies. The individualistic focus of such studies tends to underestimate or ignore the wider socio-cultural context, in which parental experiences and meaning-making about autism are embedded, implicitly locating the responsibility for poor coping within the parents. In this thesis, I seek to address such limitations by introducing other ways of theorising parental subjectivities and practices applying social constructionist and critical realist approaches to the study of autism. This research draws upon 26 interview accounts of parents of children diagnosed with autism. It is concerned with critically exploring parental experiences of their child’s diagnosis and their own identity as a parent as constituted by the cultural discourses available to them, and the ways parents negotiate these identities and experiences. I address this in two empirical chapters examining parents' constructions of the causes of autism and stigmatisation they experienced. Following a general social-constructionist orientation, I utilise a form of discourse analysis which combines the attention to macro-level discourses with the rhetorical strategies used to negotiate subjectivity. As a background for my analyses, I review the current 'expert' literature on the causes of autism in a separate chapter, due to the large volume of data. To introduce the exploration of stigma discourses, I also provide a brief overview of theoretical and empirical research on stigma, and my own formulation of stigma for the purposes of this research. In my third empirical chapter I move away from constructionism, using a critical realist approach to give voice to parents and validate their experiences of the diagnostic process. I conclude with a discussion of the importance of approaching parents' stories as constituted by societal discourses available to them, which I see as a means of de-pathologising and validating parental experiences. I reflect on the usefulness of the analytic and methodological approaches used in this thesis, discuss recommendations for practice and potential directions for further research. New theoretical understandings arising from this study, the first one based in New Zealand that utilises social constructionist approach to explore the impact of autism on the family, contributes to the extremely limited body of constructionist empirical research on autism and other developmental disabilities.
Author: Maia Eremin
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2288641796