A Practical Guide to Social Interaction Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders

This book introduces a novel approach for examining language and communication in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – discourse and conversation analysis. The authors offer a set of very different perspectives on these complex issues than are typically presented in psychological and clinical work. Emerging from a range of social scientific fields, discourse and conversation analysis involve fine-grained qualitative analysis of naturally-occurring, rather than laboratory-based, interaction, enabling broad applications. 
Presented in two parts, this innovative volume first provides a set of pedagogical chapters to develop the reader’s knowledge and skills in using these approaches, before moving to showcase the use of discursive methods through a range of original contributions from world-leading scholars, drawn from a range of disciplines including sociology, academic and clinical psychology, speech and language therapy, critical disability studies and social theory, and medicine and psychiatry.

Author Biography

Michelle O’Reilly is a Senior Lecturer for the Greenwood Institute of Child Health at the University of Leicester, and Research Consultant for Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust.  Michelle’s research interests are broadly in child mental health, family therapy, and the sociology of health and illness. 
Jessica Nina Lester is an Assistant Professor of Inquiry Methodology in the School of Education at Indiana University, USA. She teaches research methods courses, including discourse analysis, with much research focused on the study and development of qualitative methodologies and methods. 
Tom Muskett is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK.  He has worked in clinical and educational roles with children with diagnoses of autism and their families, and previously led a clinical training programme at the University of Sheffield, UK.