Quality Control: A Congratulatory Critique
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Quality Control: A Congratulatory Critique Andrés Martin1 Accepted: 29 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
I salute and congratulate the editors for their decision to embrace qualitative and mixed methods studies in the pages of the Journal of Autism and Development Disorders (JADD) (Van Schalkwyk and Dewinter 2020). In publishing such work, they provide a concrete, welcome and long overdue way to ‘give voice to the lived experience of autistic individuals and stakeholders’, and to make good on the participatory research dictum to engage in ‘nothing about me without me’ (Bergold and Thomas 2012; Quinlan 2020). At a time when academic medical journals may capitulate to the temptation of attracting only those manuscripts likely to garner bibliometric citations, qualitative works can too easily be overlooked, when not actively dismissed. In the case of psychiatry, JADD is providing a healthy example and helping buck the trend of a relatively weak tradition for this kind of scholarship. Without assertive editorial action of this kind, there is a risk for further diminishment in the prospects for such critically important work to find its way into psychiatric print or pixel. Against this backdrop, I read with interest the recently published qualitative study on gender dysphoria among adults with autism (Smith et al. 2020). Through rich verbatim quotes from its participants, this report provides valuable insights about ‘conflict versus congruence’ and will undoubtedly help better serve the clinical needs of a doubly vulnerable, isolated, and often stigmatized population. However, and at the risk of being branded a nitpicker, I do have a methodological bone to pick with the article, and one that I bring up not in the spirit of ‘cutting down’ the authors’ original and timely piece, but of helping ‘build up’ what the JADD editors have so thoughtfully set themselves out to do. The issue at hand is the use by Smith and colleagues of grounded theory (GT) as their method of choice. Despite citing the canonical works of Glaser and Strauss (1967) and its
* Andrés Martin [email protected] 1
Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, 230 South Frontage Road, New Haven, CT 06520‑7900, USA
constructivist adaptation by Charmaz (2006), I would argue that the authors did not in fact use GT or engage in its ‘necessary groundwork’ (Watling et al. 2017). I offer this critique based on what I consider the authors’ failure to incorporate two of three core ingredients of GT. First, I would not categorize the re-interviewing of four of their subjects as theoretical sampling. The opportunity sample that they used was fixed, and not revisited as a result of the ongoing interviews; it was a convenience group of individuals mainly recruited through clinical services and support groups. Second, GT is an approach that inherently conceptualizes subjects as social actors. As such, it is hard to reconcile an approach in which only ‘index’ participants are recruited—wit
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