Recommendations for Increasing Sample Diversity in Autism Research: Lessons from Multisensory Studies.
Multisensory autism research skips high-support-needs people—use the authors’ checklist to fix that in your own assessments.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Melegari et al. (2025) read every multisensory autism paper they could find. They wanted to see who gets studied and who gets left out.
They counted how many participants could talk, how many needed daily help, and how old they were.
What they found
Almost every study used young, verbal kids who needed little daily help. High-support-needs autistics were missing.
The team made a checklist so future studies can include more kinds of participants.
How this fits with other research
Taylor et al. (2010) and Lancioni et al. (2011) ran small lab tests with the same narrow group. G et al. show this pattern is the rule, not the exception.
Diemer et al. (2023) found sensory issues in 74 % of 25,000 autistic kids. G et al. ask: why do lab studies ignore most of them?
Austin et al. (2015) warned that sensory treatments lack proof. G et al. add a reason: the proof comes from the wrong people.
Why it matters
Your next sensory assessment can do better. Use the paper’s checklist to invite non-speaking clients, adults, and anyone who needs daily help. Broader samples mean findings that actually fit your caseload.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In 2024, the United States House of Representatives passed ruling H.R.7213, the Autism CARES Act, which, if passed by the Senate, will reauthorize funding to extant national autism research programs, with an emphasis on including autistic individuals significantly affected by the disorder. This shift toward research inclusion across the autism spectrum clearly highlights the lack of representation in the past. In the field of multisensory integration, it is well documented that there are changes to how autistic individuals integrate stimuli across different sensory modalities, and the relationship between atypical (multi)sensory processing and the core features of autism is well documented. However, much of this research utilizes samples of autistic individuals with high cognitive, verbal, and functional ability. The purpose of this review is to draw attention to disparities in the samples used in multisensory research in autism. We conducted a systematic review of all studies examining multisensory function in autism to date and provide basic descriptive statistics of the studies. We observed that the vast majority of multisensory research is focused on young, low support needs autistic individuals, with very little investigation in autistic individuals with high support needs (HSN). Additionally, we found investigation into the effect of sex or comorbidities to be lacking. We propose methodological improvements addressing gaps in the research in order to make multisensory research in autism more inclusive to HSN autistics.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s10803-018-3680-0