Asking & Observing: SARRC's Plan and Research

Hello again friends! Nice to see you all back at my almost finished blog. It's coming down to the wire and I'm so very excited to pull through and get started with the presentations at hand. It's been a long journey, but it's almost over so let's get on to my second to last post.

B/c Journey get it....Don't stop Believin...never mind.

So here's the thing. Looks like I actually did get a chance to interview the doctors. Dr. James (or Stephen) actually helped convince some of the clinicians to find room in their schedules to go thorough with my interviews, so I was very excited but also very nervous. Though I might be sacrificing sample number for in-depth answers, I think it might be better to have a select few but also having quality answers at the same time. I got into the whole interview, knowing absolutely nothing about how to start or do anything, so my heart fluttered about and I blanked for a few seconds. However, once I got into the first few questions, it was just like any regular talk but with me leading the conversation (which I'm not used to). 

Here are the questions I asked:

1. What are some of the early signs/indicators for autism? The most prominent one?

2. How early can you detect these specific symptoms for autism?

3. What are some of the issues when diagnosing cases later (like when they're more mature)?

4. What do you think are some of the challenges when diagnosing children with autism?

5. What made you interested in starting you research in autism? (personal question)

I went through about three interviews this week, but I'm hoping to at least get three more next week to get some more different conclusions. I learned quite a lot about autism research some more, and it was definitely interesting to talk about how many of the clinicians got into their field of study and research. It was really a great motivator to push me into working harder for my career in the future.

Other than the interviews, I continued with more diagnostic sessions with more clients. I'm trying to observe a sample of children to see if similar qualities and behaviors are shared with children who may have autism. So far this week, I got three more session, two of which were hard to sit through. The second child was not as loud and uncooperative, but he was very shy and sometimes failed to do the tasks because I was sitting there in the room. I understand the whole strangers are scary thing because I was the little kid once, but it really hurts the other way around. I now sympathize for the adults that I shied away from. :(

However, the other two experiences were not as mellow. I've noticed that most kids with autism have a strong fixation to a singular detail or object, and once it holds on to that specific thing, the child can't focus on anything else. It was kind of strange how both kids were acting. It was sort of like they were in some sort of trance, and if anything disturbs the specific object of focus, they freak out. For instance, one of the kids had a liking to one of the hair brushes in the room because of the weird texture in the front (I think). Whenever the clinician tried to remove the brush from his hands, he would scream and sort of like panic. It's really to grab their attention once their focus is somewhere else, and this is part of the reason why, sometimes, the tests go nowhere. Additionally, it's very interesting to see that most of the kids we get a week are mostly male, which kind of justify the idea that males are more likely to get autism than females. It was just something I noticed because all of the clients I had so far were all male. Interesting.

That's pretty much happened this week. I'll start working on more of my project presentation this week, so I can't wait to tell you guys some more details of what everything will be like. I hope you all stay next week to see the last week of my SRP at the SARRC facility. Bye!