| Description |
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common childhood neurodevelopmental disorder. Epidemiological studies have found a disparity in diagnosis for children from Hispanic and low-income families, as compared to Anglo (White, non-Hispanic) children, who are more likely to be diagnosed earlier. This study considered whether parents‘ discursive ability and resources could be a factor in delayed ASD diagnosis. The purposive sample for this critical linguistic and discursive study included 10 Hispanic parents with a sociolinguistic heritage from Mexico, and 10 Anglo parents with a sociolinguistic heritage from the U.S. The Hispanic sample was less privileged than the Anglo sample, which had higher average levels of income, education, and English speaking skills. The sources of data included digitally transcribed texts from interviews of the 20 participant parents and the texts scraped from nine national ASD websites. Phase 1 of the analysis coded, compared, and critically analyzed accounts of Hispanic and Anglo parents regarding their experience of assessing and obtaining a professional diagnosis of their child‘s behavior. Phase 2 employed critical linguistic/discourse analysis of the scraped texts from ASD websites and subsequent content analysis of those texts regarding the diagnosis and treatment of a child with ASD. The findings from the first phase suggest that Anglo parents focused on constructing themselves as -good parents‖ who met ideological expectations for monitoring and caring for their children. In contrast, most Hispanic parents used their iv discourse and resources to construct themselves as concerned about their children‘s linear progress in school, ability to communicate, and social adaptability. Findings from the second phase of analysis suggest that the same discourse used by privileged parents in this study, on a microlevel, were consistent with the dominant U.S. macrolevel discourse and ideology of the -good parent‖ as emerged from the ASD website data. This study suggests that, the more closely parents, either Hispanic or Anglo, were aligned with the privileged discourse model or ideology of the U.S. Anglo -good parent,‖ the fewer barriers they reported to diagnosis. This study also suggests the need for further research, particularly about the Hispanic/Mexican discursive model of parenting. |
