Autistic Children: A Qualitative Study

This is a qualitative study of courtesy stigma among 32 parents of autistic children. The results show that autism has uniquely stigmatizing aspects as it extremely disruptive nature of autistic symptoms, the typical physical appearance of autistic children, and absence of public knowledge and accepting the nature of autism. Most parents perceived themselves to be judged by their child's disorder. There was a strong trend for mothers to feel more stigmatized than fathers. Parents with more severely disabled children and children who were under the age of twelve were more likely to see themselves to be stigmatized (Gray, 1993).
An issue raised by this research that cannot be resolved by the present data, is the difference in perceived stigma