Communicating Dietary Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Indonesia: A Study of Virtual Community on Facebook

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) need appropriate treatment and intervention as early as possible after the diagnosis was made. Besides therapy, diet is one of the interventions that could be carried out by parents, although the positive effects of diet are still debatable among experts. This study aimed to understand the pattern of seeking information related to dietary interventions for ASD children in a virtual community of parent support group in Indonesia. The data was obtained from a virtual community on Facebook, named LRD Member Suar Autisme. This research was qualitative with virtual ethnographic method. The data collection technique was carried out through participant observation on the LRD Member Suar Autisme Facebook account, by examining 178 uploads, 3,569 comments and interview with community members. Data encoding was done using the NVivo 12 Pro software. The results showed that the pattern of seeking information about dietary interventions by community members began with questions or seeking information regarding the following matters: 1) Members' concern about ASD children who behaved badly, ranging from tantrums, lack of two-way communication, to no eye contact 2) Questions from members about the procedure for implementing the diet 3) Questions about problems experienced when dieting, such as children who are picky eaters, disobeying the diet and how to implement the diet when the child was sick 4) Questions about supporting tools, such as recommended cooking utensils to be used when cooking diet foods. In addition, it can also be identified patterns of presenting information about dietary intervention by admins starting with four types of uploads: 1) uploading information about diet 2) reposting information about diet 3) requests and questions to share about diet 4) reinforcement or reminder for diet. Our study showed that dietary intervention was one of the ways suggested by the community to reduce the improper behaviour of ASD children, especially based on the experiences of admins and members in the virtual community