https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... 2/aur.1746
I firmly believe that it does need to change, and radically. I have read more crap science on autism than any other field, and enthusiastic headlines about very poor studies are still very common. I suspect that many second rater (or third rater) experimenters choose autism because the claims are received so gullibly.
At least the fashion for simplistic neuroscience claims about autism - many based on designs and assumptions so reductionist that they wouldn't be tolerated in any other field - is now on the wane, having used up vast funds for no real benefit (except for getting publicity for the researchers).
One of the most common issues that concerns me is the many research conclusions which make wild leaps into nonsense - mistaking between group differences for cause.
To illustrate this, imagine you are a researcher. You decide to measure the rate of eye blinks between an NT group and an AS group. You find that the AS group blinks more often (or less often) than the other. What can you conclude from this? That a faster or slower rate causes autism? That the blink rate of either group represents what happens in the real world? That the NT rate is normal and the AS rate must therefore be abnormal? That the AS group blinkrate is different because of their (wrongly assumed to be identical) neurologies?
In fact the experiment would prove none of these things. I have made the example quite simplistic, as an illustration, but I see versions of it all the time in funded research.
One of the big issues is sampling, and there are many reasons why. But the biggest is the variety in the AS population itself, the "heterogenous" nature of AS. The researchers manufacture an assumption about the AS samples, in that they are treated as a homogenous group. It is a fundamental absurdity, and as we say here, validly, when you have met one AS person, you have met one AS person. Within group difference is a huge biasing factor in all social science research if it is not very professionally and carefully managed and analysed. But this doesn't matter to the people making their bogus claims after shonky research on AS.
I am SICK of it.
07 May 2018, 2:29 am
