Examining Stigma Towards College Students with Withdrawn and Disruptive Autism: Does the Label “Autism” Confer a Protective Effect?

Background:

Stigma towards autism remains apparent in college communities (Matthews et al., 2015). Perhaps to avoid stigma associated with the label “autism”, only one-third of students identified as autistic in high school identify themselves as autistic in college (Newman et al., 2011). This choice may often be counterproductive as research suggests that college students are more accepting of peers who exhibit autistic behaviors when they are labeled as autistic (Brosnan & Mills, 2016; Matthews et al., 2015). However, prior research examining attitudes towards college students who exhibit autistic behaviors has focused on students who exhibit mild symptoms of autism and has confounded the label “autism” with a description of characteristics of autism and an indication that the autistic student is exceptionally intelligent. Potential benefits of the label “autism” are also likely to vary across cultural contexts (Obeid et al., 2015).

Objectives:

We examined if the label “autism”:

• is less stigmatized than behaviors associated with autism among college students in the U.S. and Lebanon,
• confers protective benefits by reducing stigma towards symptoms of autism,
• is described differently than unlabeled symptoms when participants are asked to define the student’s condition after reading a label, an unlabeled vignette, or a labeled vignette.

Methods:

College students from the U.S. and Lebanon were randomly assigned to evaluate the label “college student with autism,” unlabeled vignettes describing college students with mild/withdrawn and severe/disruptive autism, or labeled vignettes by using an adapted version of the Social Distance Scale (assessing stigma; Bogardus, 1933) and by defining “the student’s condition.” Reliability of qualitative coding exceeded 95%. Only p-values ≤.001 were considered significant.

Results:

A repeated-measures analysis with stigma toward mild and severe autism as the dependent variables and group (label, vignette, or label plus vignette), country, and gender as independent variables revealed that stigma was higher for severe than mild symptoms of autism, highest among participants assigned to unlabeled vignettes, lower among participants assigned to labeled vignettes (a protective effect of the label), and lowest among participants assigned to the label autism (ps < .001). The attached table displays results from qualitative analyses comparing labels to vignettes in both the US and Lebanon. Participants in the US were more likely to name other disorders (such as ADHD or social anxiety) in the autism vignette condition relative to participants in Lebanon. Participants in both countries were less likely to identify autism in the vignette depicting a disruptive student with autism relative to the label.

Conclusions:

Consistent with research examining stigma more generally (Link et al. 1999), symptoms of autism are more stigmatized than the label “autism”. In line with our prior research (Obeid et al., 2015), participants in the US were more likely to confuse autism with other disorders. Findings suggest that the behaviors of autism are stigmatized (particularly disruptive behaviors), and many people are unaware of what these behaviors consist of, suggesting that if more college students were educated about the different levels of severity of autism, they might become more accepting of their neurodiverse peers.