Autistic and Accompanied: On Autistic Communities and its Literature

Abstract

It is now widely recognized that the literature on the autism community, like the number of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, has exploded in the last decade. In sociological research focusing on the autism spectrum community, even though landing on the same topic as they might be, the research questions of different authors are often diverse, fragmented, and disparate, and the relatively heterogeneous nature of both the research methods and the disciplinary contexts in which the research is rooted adds to the complexity of the situation faced by researchers wishing to provide an overview of the field. This paper attempts to provide a brief overview of the current state of research on the autism community by topic. The reviewed articles on autism communities are selected by keyword search and related literature search, and then organized and summarized in terms of research contents, research methods and reference values. The existing research on autism communities are arranged in terms of their coverage and database characteristics, in hope that doing so would point out possible future directions for researchers.