In this edition of “Accessible Academia” we look at two recent papers, exploring the impact of work on neurodivergent people.
What is Accessible Academia? (Click for the answer…)
We take the latest academic papers about neurodivergence and neurodivergent people, and with the permission of the authors, condense it into an accessible summary for non-academics.
Drop downs like this provide further information about research methods and writing styles and can help you learn more about how research is conducted and communicated.
Too much to take in in one go? Jump to specific sections of this post and come back later to read the rest:
– Mental Health of Autistic Working Parents
– Neurodivergence, and Working From Home
– References
Mental Health of Autistic Working Parents
There’s lots of research on the mental health impacts of parenthood on autistic people, and likewise on working parents, but one team at La Trobe University in Melbourne found a gap. In their recent review paper, Gore et al. looked for research investigating the mental health of autistic working parents.
What is a review paper?
A review paper looks, not at the results of a single study that the authors conduct, but at the results of lots of related papers to come to a conclusion. As a researcher, these types of papers are great if you want to develop a thorough understanding of the topic as a whole.
These are sometimes called systematic reviews because they follow a very clear process to make sure they don’t miss anything.
Given the priority that autistic people place on mental health as a topic of research and support, the authors identified that this was a very important subject to investigate.
The team identified 12 papers that were relevant to their research questions through a process of searching research databases such as Web of Science (which yielded 9486 results), then gradually excluding studies as they checked if they were relevant.
Thoroughly reading through these 12 papers, the authors made note of the aims, method, and information about the paper’s sample. They also, importantly, looked at the findings of each of these papers, on which they combine and compare with the results of other papers.
Using this data, the authors went on to describe the characteristics of the people that the studies investigated. The papers described populations of various english-speaking countries (4 papers from the UK, 4 from Australia, 2 from Canada, 1 from the US, 1 from Europe) as well as varying (though very female/women heavy) sex/gender demographics.
Gore et al. found that additional social communication demands on autistic working mothers can have a compounding negative effect on their mental health, with a similar picture apparent in the case of increased sensory inputs.
The combination of employment and parenting was associated with greater experiences of stress, burnout, and poorer mental health in autistic working mothers, in line with the previous research looking at non-autistic mothers.
The authors highlight the need for more quantitative (numerical) data in studies looking at mental health in autistic working parents, especially as it enables the opportunity to compare to other groups. They also highlight the need for more demographic details in papers, as well as future work looking at the impacts of socioeconomic status and differing parenting styles.
What is quantitative data?
Researchers will often refer to data they collect as either being quantitative or qualitative.
Quantitative data is numerical: the number of people visiting a place, the number of hours someone spends making something, the number of “yes” responses to a survey.
Qualitative data is made up of words and opinions: the opinion of people visiting a place, the item that someone makes, long-form worded questions on a survey.
“Investigating the mental health of Autistic working parents: A scoping review” was written by Katherine Gore, Melissa Gilbert, Susan M Hayward, Rebecca L Flower, and Josephine Barbaro. This work was publised under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license: the full citation is provided in the references.
Neurodivergence, and Working From Home
One of the pandemics many impacts (read more about the pandemic’s influence on neurodivergent people in our previous Accessible Academia post) was the major shift from working in the office to working from home. Initial media buzz suggested this would have a positive impact on neurodivergent people’s working experience, but was this actually the case?
A team led by Samantha Brooks at Kings College London decided to look into this more closely. Like Gore et al. described above, the authors completed a review of relevant literature, finding 25 studies which fit their inclusion criteria.
The team went through these papers, assigning them a score for their quality. Qualitative studies, the authors identified, scored highly for quality, but some were let down by a lack of consideration of the relationship between researcher and participants. Some of the quantitative studies often failed to include details about how many non-respondents there were.
Why do you need to consider the relationship between researchers and participants?
Imagine you’re running a company and you want to learn about how well your employees are working from home. You send them a survey asking them how focused they are working from home, and you’re pleased to see that they report being completely 100% focussed. Would you believe this result?
In research, it might be a bit more subtle than this. The relationship between researchers and participants will be discussed during an ethics review. The researchers might also declare a conflicting interest which might impact their research at the end of their papers.
Using thematic analysis, the authors went through each of the papers to identify themes of discussion among many papers. In this case, they found four main themes, each with a couple of subthemes.
What is thematic analysis?
Thematic analysis is a flexible analysis technique on text data (such as interview transcripts, survey responses, and in this case papers) where researchers first code sections of text with what was discussed, which are then brought together into themes. Some researchers may apply thematic anlysis in different ways, however.
Thematic analysis is often a collaborative effort, with researchers working together to identify common themes, especially as everyone will have their own interpretation of the text.
Throughout these themes, there was some positive aspects of working from home for neurodivergent people, like the reliance on emails (the lack of time pressure compared to talking in-person was a benefit) and greater control over their sensory environment.
Though it wasn’t all positive: some found that the change to their usual routine was overwhelming and distressing, and some, having changed over to primarily video calls, found the experience exhausting, especially with the lack of usual social and in-person visual cues.
The authors summarise their themes and findings within Table 3 in their paper.
These findings, however, were not universal. In their discussion, the authors note the importance of not assuming a “one-size-fits-all” approach to working from home for neurodivergent people. The authors provide some reccommendations to employers on how to best practice inclusive homeworking.
The team also acknowledges that many of the studies investigated were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when many of us were under additional stress, as well as a focus on studies investigating autism and ADHD, rather than less common neurodivergent conditions.
“Homeworking experiences of neuro-divergent workers: systematic review” was written by S. K. Brooks, C. E. Hall, M. B. Rogers, and N. Greenberg. This work was publised under the CC BY 4.0 license: the full citation is provided in the references.
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References
1. Gore, Katherine, Melissa Gilbert, Susan M Hayward, Rebecca L Flower, and Josephine Barbaro. ‘Investigating the Mental Health of Autistic Working Parents: A Scoping Review’. Neurodiversity 2 (1 January 2024): 27546330241272174. https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330241272174.
2. Brooks, S K, C E Hall, M B Rogers, and N Greenberg. ‘Homeworking Experiences of Neuro-Divergent Workers: Systematic Review’. Occupational Medicine, 19 October 2024, kqae095. https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqae095.