How do Caregiver Questions Contribute to Interactions with Their Autistic Children?

Currently, most autism research on social interaction has been conducted using quantitative methods. These kinds of studies can be really helpful for understanding how different aspects of social development relate to each other, predict other developmental milestones, differ between groups of children, or change as a result of intervention. However, it is also important to have really good descriptions of how interactions work, which can often be best done using qualitative methods – research strategies that aim to describe a phenomenon in great detail, rather than to quantify some feature of how it occurs. We have conducted a series of studies using a qualitative method called conversation analysis. This method can be used to understand how interactive moves- including talk, gestures, and so forth- shape and are shaped by the unfolding interaction, and how multiple interactive moves combine to create social activities such as playing.

In this study, we were interested in interactions where the caregiver posed questions to their children when they already knew the answer to the questions. These kinds of questions are common in classrooms, when teachers ask their students questions to test their knowledge. Because the caregiver already knows the answer to the question, they often follow the child’s response with an evaluation indicating whether or not the response was right. The result is Question – Response – Evaluation, or QRE, sequence. These kinds of sequences might be really easy for autistic children to engage in, because they have a predictable format and because the caregiver can support the child’s involvement.

We analyzed video recordings of interactions between a 5-year-old bilingual autistic boy and his parents, using Conversation Analysis. The recordings were of home routines such as play, book-reading and schoolwork. We created detailed transcripts of the recordings, then selected QRE sequences to analyze them on a turn-by-turn basis. We looked at how the questions and the evaluation turns were formatted, and the kinds of social activities that these sequences worked to create.

Q-word questions, which contained who, what, where, when or how words, were the most common known-answer question, followed by interrogatives (do you know which one it is?) and declaratives (it’s the blue one?). Caregivers evaluated children’s responses in several ways including by giving affirmation or praise, repeating the children’s answer, or moving on to a similar question. QRE sequences were involved in a variety of social activities, including resolving misunderstandings, creative play, and ‘labeling’ games (e.g., naming a list of relatives).

These findings were interesting, because they showed that known answer questions can support a range of social activities, other than testing children’s knowledge. Practitioners should keep this in mind when they are advising caregivers about how best to support autistic children’s interactions.

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