Disorder or difference? How clinician-patient interaction and patient age shape the process and meaning of autism diagnosis.

This article follows Blaxter's foundational call for a sociology of diagnosis that addresses the dual aspects of diagnosis-as-category and diagnosis-as-process. Drawing on video recordings from an autism clinic, we show how the process of attaching the diagnosis to a child involves interactions between clinicians, parents and children, and that in the course of such interactions, a diagnostic category officially defined in terms of deficits can instead be formulated in terms of valuable social and cognitive differences. More specifically, we show that the child's age is crucial for how clinicians formulate the diagnosis: with younger children, clinicians treat autism exclusively as a deficit to be remedied, whereas with older children, clinicians may treat autism either as a deficit or as a social-cognitive difference. Further, because older children are often co-recipients of diagnostic news, we find that clinicians carefully manage the implications such news may have for their self/identity. Finally, we suggest that (1) the equation of a diagnostic category with dysfunction is achieved in interaction; (2) the meaning of a diagnosis may vary with characteristics of its recipients; and (3) that meaning can be worked up by clinicians and recipients in ways that centre difference rather than deficit.

Particularizing the picture: Features and uses of instantiation stories told by clinicians doing autism diagnosis.

Diagnosis is the narrative process through which professional clinicians transform experiences of illness and disability into disease (Hunter, 1991; Jutel, 2009; Kleinman et al., 1978). Maynard and Turowetz (2017a) found that the narrative structure for autism diagnosis consists of two primary story types concerning the conduct of children under assessment: (1) tendency stories about propensities or quantifications of behavior, and (2) instantiation stories that describe single instances of conduct occurring at a specific time or place. Instantiation stories represent a mechanism by which clinicians might preserve particulars about children under assessment in a way that is informative for configuring diagnoses that attend to the child's individuality rather than as a generic autistic child. This paper constitutes an investigation into the uses and features of instantiation stories as told by clinicians doing autism diagnosis. Clinicians primarily use instantiation stories to support generalizations about the child that relate to official diagnostic criteria (Excerpt 1). Clinicians also use instantiation stories to index instances of conduct that apparently misalign with a tendency description and the diagnostic picture (Excerpt 2). In such cases, clinicians work to demonstrate how the generalization endures despite the apparent misalignment. Furthermore, clinicians may use instantiation stories to tell about humorous or otherwise "storyable" (Sacks, 1992) conduct (Excerpt 3). Finally, clinicians sometimes use instantiation stories to mitigate the delivery of a diagnosis (Excerpt 4).