Discourses of parents with austistic children on autism

The purpose of this study is to examine the parent's explanations about autism and find out the interpretative repertoires used as discursive resources for these explanations who have a child with autism. Within this aim, semistructured individual interviews were conducted with 10 parents who live in Istanbul and who have a child diagnosed with autism and aged between 4 and 11 years old. Interviews were recorded and then transcribed. Interview texts were analyzed through "discourse analysis" which is based on Wetherell and Potter's (1988) "interpretive repertoires" approach. As a result of the analysis, 6 different interpretative repertoires were obtained: "Autism as diversity", "autism as a medical problem", "autism as handicap/inability", "autism as a religious testing", "autism as marginalisation", "autism as a self-improvement opportunity". It can be said that these interpretative repertoires are associated with societal discourses about autism as well as with the participants' individual experiences. While the participants describe the situation of having an autistic child as challenging and devastating, they get support from religious discourse and "individual improvement" discourse. Keywords: Autism, parental acceptance, marginalisation, discourse analysis, interpretative repertoires