Deficit, difference, or both? Autism and neurodiversity

A survey of 657 people on how they think about autism, which finds more common ground between the competing framings than the slogans suggest.

Kapp, S. K., Gillespie-Lynch, K., Sherman, L. E. & Hutman, T. (2013). Deficit, difference, or both? Autism and neurodiversity. Developmental Psychology, 49(1), 59–71.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1037/a0028353

Checked

Against the abstract, 15 September 2026

Why it is on the list

Autistic respondents and those aware of the neurodiversity movement tended to see autism as an identity rather than a condition to be removed. Yet on several questions, people with different relations to autism answered alike. The course reads it as a guard against its own slogans: the framing this course takes is contested, and the people it concerns hold more than one view at once.