Previous work on narrative, particularly autobiographical narrative, suggests that autistic children are less equipped to engage in conversations about their day than their non-autistic peers. Significant associations have been found between parental engagement and reduced bullying among autistic students, which suggests that parents who are engaged with, and aware of, their children's school experiences may play a protective role by reporting incidents of bullying relayed by their children. The objectives of this project are: (a) To collect and analyse a corpus of conversational data between autistic school-aged children and their parents or carers, and a parallel corpus from non-autistic children, and survey questionnaires completed by parents, in order to: (i) establish whether parents perceive there to be difficulties in communicating about the school day with their autistic child; (ii) Determine what type of personal autobiographical stories children tell abouth their day after school; (iii) Determine whether parents and children engage in discussion of possible alternative scenarios in talking about school experiences; (iv) Identify where communication breakdowns occur in conversations between autistic children and their families about the school day, and; (b) To develop an outline of a trial intervention targeting conversational interaction between parents and children after school based on the answers to these questions.
Funder
Funder
Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
