Today I officially closed my autistic-adult questionnaire and moved into the analysis stage of my primary research.
The final dataset contains 10 participants: 8 female and 2 male respondents, with ages ranging from 18 to 64. All participants completed the full set of open-ended questions, giving me a qualitative dataset focused on independence, international travel experiences, barriers, support needs and difficult stages of the airport journey.
Before beginning analysis, I first needed to make sure the dataset was organised correctly. I checked that each participant response was clearly separated and that there were no duplicate entries. This was particularly important because an earlier version of my dataset contained a duplicated response, so I wanted to make sure the final set of 10 participants represented 10 unique responses.
The purpose of this research was not to create statistically representative data about all autistic adults, but to collect detailed lived-experience accounts that could help me understand patterns, differences and barriers within independent international travel.
The responses are varied, but there are already recurring areas around things such as:
However, I do not want to treat these as final themes yet. The next stage is to analyse the responses systematically rather than simply selecting the points that seem most noticeable to me.
I have chosen to use Braun and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis to analyse the qualitative responses.
The first stage will be familiarising myself with the full dataset and beginning to create initial codes. A code is a short label that captures something meaningful within a participant’s response.
For example, if a participant says: