Interviews Study

This page contains more information about the interviews study, including what type of people we’re looking to take part, and what exactly will happen if you decide to get involved.

Who can take part?

For the interviews study, we are looking for people who have self-diagnosed themselves as either autistic or having ADHD, and especially when social media helped them do that. I will interview these people, and ask them what this experience was like for them. We are hopefully going to interview about 10 people. These people are different from the people taking part in the community advisory board. For the interviews, here is a list of things we are looking for:

People who are autistic or have ADHD (or are autistic and have ADHD, some people call this AuDHD), and who first decided this for themselves. This means it wasn’t a parent, a teacher, a doctor, or any other person who led to this person getting diagnosed. It’s ok if these people have now been to see a doctor or other professional and received a formal diagnosis, but we want to talk to people who decided they were autistic and/or had ADHD on their own.
People who first thought they might be autistic or have ADHD because of things they had seen on social media. We are really interested in how the internet and social media specifically help with this process, so it’s important for these people to be able to talk about their social media use. If you are self-diagnosed, but got your information only from books or other neurodivergent people, this study isn’t suited to your experiences.
You must be at least 18 years old.
You must live in the UK.

What will I do?

If you choose to get involved with the interviews study, you will be invited to attend an interview with the lead researcher (Ruth, she/her). Below is a list of things to know about the interview, so you can decide if you would like to take part.

The interview will be one-to-one. This means that the only people in the conversation will be you and Ruth.
The interview will probably take place on Zoom. If you would like to take part but Zoom wouldn’t be a good option for you, we can try to accommodate different ways of doing the interview, but some alternatives might not be possible for this project.
The interview will last for about 1 hour. This sounds like a long time, but it means we can ask lots of questions and hear about your experiences in a lot of detail. A lot of people think that they won’t be able to talk for this amount of time, but then they end up wanting the interview to last even longer. We will be flexible with the time, so you can talk for as long (or as short) as you want – but hopefully you will have lots to say.
The interview will be recorded. If the interview takes place on Zoom, this will be done with Zoom’s built-in recording feature. If the interview takes place in a different format, an external audio recording machine will be used. When the interview is finished, Ruth will listen back to the recording and type out exactly everything that was said. After doing this, the audio recording will be deleted. When the interview is typed up, anything you say that might make it obvious that it’s you speaking (for example, your name, your neighbourhood, your social media username, your blog etc) will be taken out. This means that even if someone read through the interview, they wouldn’t know it was you talking. This means that when Ruth writes up all of her results and turns it into her PhD dissertation, she can use quotes and still make sure your privacy is protected.

If you would like to find out more, you can email Ruth at: ruth.leiser@strath.ac.uk

When we are ready to start asking people to take part in the interviews, you will be able to access all the documents on this page.