Online Community Building Among People on the Autism Spectrum

This study is looking at how online communities for people on the autism spectrum, specifically YouTube, can be a place of comfort. People should care about this because these communities can negate some of the stigma felt by people on the autism spectrum. By providing comfort, online communities serve as a support group of sorts for stigmatized individuals. To do this, videos are chosen and the comments are placed into excel sheets and then coded for themes by two research assistants. After this, we look for discrepancies in our coding and resolve those before finalizing the sheets. Some patterns we have been seeing in the comments of these videos are that other autistic people appreciate seeing other’s like themselves on these types of platforms. Another pattern is people who have kids or loved ones who have autism and are using these videos to learn more about the topic. The videos are mostly people with autism sharing their experiences, which can validate experiences of other people who may not have the social skills to seek out others like them. While there still is a fair amount of trolling, the majority is people who themselves are on the autism spectrum complimenting and sharing their experiences. These patterns show that there is some community-building going on within these YouTube comments, which seems to show that these spaces can be good for people on the autism spectrum