The purpose of this study was to explore primary students’ knowledge of autism, to reveal what they know about autism, how much and how accurately they understand autism and individuals (e.g., their peers) with autism. The following chapter discusses the research design for the study, ethical considerations, participants, the research instruments used in this study, and data analysis.
Research Design
A qualitative research design was chosen to allow for a rich description and explanation of students’ knowledge of autism. In general, there are many valid reasons for choosing qualitative research design: (a) to understand the meaning or nature of experience of persons; (b) to find out what people are doing and thinking; and (c) to explore
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The KAQ is a 10-item ‘True’ or ‘False’ scale designed to measure Year 6 to Year 8 students’ knowledge of cause, course, symptoms, and communicability (contagiousness) of autism. In this study, the wording of the previous questionnaire was adjusted with age-appropriate language for target participant group (Years 4 to 6), and was written in spoken language, as participants were interviewed instead of answering the survey questions. In addition, instead of asking participants to answer ‘True’ or ‘False’ to a given statement that targets a specific area of knowledge, the KAQ-I was designed to ask students open-ended questions with prompts, in a similar way to what occurred in the study by Glasberg (2000). Two questions were added (i.e., Questions 4 and 5) to attain data about participants’ exposure to the term ‘autism’ and whether participants had experience with a person with autism. The question “What is autism?” was adapted from Campbell, Morton, Roulston, and Barger (2011), in which participants provided spontaneous written definitions of autism. Instead of having participants writing down what they think autism is (Campbell et al., 2011), participants in this study answered the questions verbally, while their responses were