English official language minorities in Quebec who have autism: Healthcare access and developmental outcomes
This project extends research on the healthcare access of official language minorities in Canada to a new population: individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their families. Individuals with ASD face significant communication challenges (APA, 2013). There are consequential delays in the access to ASD services in Quebec, to both obtain a diagnosis (Zwaigenbaum et al., 2019), and then wait for provincial services (Rivard et al., 2014). We expect that English speakers in Quebec with ASD will face compounded challenges in access to services due to communication difficulties, delays in ASD services, and minority language status. Official language minorities in Canada (English-speaking people in Quebec, and French-speaking people in other provinces) face multiple barriers to healthcare access, and negative disparities in health outcomes (Bouchard & Desmeules, 2013; de Moissac & Bowen, 2019; Falconer & Quesnel-Vallée, 2014). In the US, language barriers had negative impacts on service access for families with a child with ASD (St. Amant et al., 2018). Researchers aim to 1) evaluate the accessibility of health and social services to English-speaking families with a child with ASD in Quebec, relative to French-speaking families and 2) obtain detailed information from a subset of families with adolescents with ASD, via focus groups, including richer quantitative survey data on the question of service access and language and cognitive measures that serve as indicators of developmental health outcomes. By identifying potential disparities in access, as well as their implications for outcomes, this project furthers the goal of optimal outcomes for English speakers in Quebec.
Outputs:
Amantayev, N. & Nadig, A. (2022, May). Healthcare Access of Language Minorities with Autism: The Case of English Official Language Minorities in Quebec, Canada. Poster to be presented at the annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research, Austin, Texas, USA.