title: What reading fiction can do: The value of literature in challenging deficit-based understandings of autistic people
Creators: name: Chapple, Melissa
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2022

description: This thesis qualitatively explores what reading can tell us about the largely deficit-focused models that psychology currently offers to understand autism. There is a specific focus on exploring how reading might overcome dominant ways of thinking about social differences and how this can then be implemented to challenge stigmatised views towards and within autistic people. Due to pre-existing assumptions that autistic people typically dislike fiction as a result of its inherent social nature, the everyday reading habits and preferences of autistic adults in comparison to non-autistic adults were initially explored (Chapter 2). While the autistic participants in Chapter 2 tended to prefer fiction and non-fiction equally, we found that both groups enjoyed and engaged with fiction in their everyday lives. When asked about future shared reading designs, the autistic participants indicated a preference for smaller groups, providing texts ahead of time and adapting the reading aloud method to minimise social tensions and reduce recollections of negative school experiences. We then explored an adapted shared reading design (Chapter 3) with four autistic – non-autistic pairs who came together for 4 weekly, one-hour discussions. Concerns with being read aloud to were addressed by having participants read the literary text in advance alongside the completion of a structured diary to record their reading reflections. Diaries were reintroduced during the weekly sessions to facilitate discussion around the book. Findings revealed that this adapted shared reading design seemed to elicit the same advantages as traditional shared reading designs. Specifically, within each pair a move was identified from participants starting with a sense of group difference towards a much more nuanced exploration of their subtler differences within a broader, felt sense of human similarity. Chapter 4 explores the diary responses to the literature collected as part of the study described in Chapter 3, with the inclusion of additional participants for data saturation. Findings indicated that autistic and non-autistic participants approached the literature in similar ways. However, it was found that the autistic participants tended to show a greater ability to hold onto more internal representations, detail and possibilities at once and to respond with and to them at greater depth than the non-autistic participants had typically demonstrated. Chapter 5 then compared serious literature and non-fiction and to consider which might be best suited for use with autistic adults in future shared reading designs. Results suggested that the literary texts enabled participants to actively think, feel and experience a text as a felt reality, while non-fiction generally failed to move participants beneath the surface of the text. Within Chapter 5, the autistic and non-autistic participants again seemed to read in largely similar ways. However, autistic participants tended to continue holding onto detail beyond the reading experience by recalling specific characters or situations, while the non-autistic participants seemed to reduce their experience down to extract key ideas and information This work has contributed to understandings of the different ways autistic and non-autistic adults read different kinds of texts and how this can better inform us about nuanced social differences between autistic and non-autistic people. Collectively, the thesis findings challenge the over-simplified deficit-based ways of thinking about autism that have come to characterise how psychology thinks about the condition. This work demonstrates the value of inter-disciplinary work in rehumanising explorations of autistic people and human social abilities more broadly.