Intersubjectivity, participation and the moral order in everyday family talk involving young autistic children

Studying real-world, everyday family interactions is valuable for developing our knowledge of how autistic children and their family members participate in and organise social interaction. This thesis examines naturally occurring family interactions involving young autistic children with speech, language and communication needs. It aims to broaden our knowledge of how the autistic children participate in family interaction and how autism becomes relevant to everyday family talk. The thesis focuses on three specific phenomena: initiating and responsive action sequences in parent-child dyadic interaction, how co-participants refer to their autistic child in their presence within multiparty interaction and how parents issue directives to non-autistic siblings about activities related to their autistic sibling. The study employed the methodology of conversation analysis to examine over twelve hours of video-recorded naturalistic interactions produced by four families. Both dyadic and multiparty interactions were analysed. The findings from this study demonstrate how family interactions were vulnerable to a loss of intersubjectivity between interlocutors, how this delayed the progressivity of sequences and how this situation was managed. The analysis also evidences how participants engage in sense-making practices related to the autistic children’s communication and how they oriented to communication successes as well as difficulties. Lastly, the findings demonstrate how co-present siblings participate in interactions and how the family moral order is interactionally established in parent-sibling sequences. These findings expand our understanding of the sequential organisation of dyadic and multiparty family interactions involving autistic children.