Stigma and knowledge about autism in Brazil: A psychometric and intervention study.
A short online class in Brazilian Portuguese cut autism stigma and raised knowledge among college students using new, free scales.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Araujo et al. (2024) built two short scales in Brazilian Portuguese. One measures autism stigma. The other measures autism knowledge.
They put the scales online and invited university students to take them. Then the students watched a brief online training about autism. After the training they took the same scales again.
Seventy-nine students finished both sets of measures.
What they found
After the short online course students knew more facts about autism. They also showed less stigma.
The new scales held together well, so teams can reuse them in Brazil.
How this fits with other research
The result lines up with McGonigle et al. (2014) and Morris et al. (2020). Those studies ran face-to-face anti-stigma lessons in UK and Irish schools. All three papers show the same trend: teach typical peers about autism and attitudes improve.
Granillo et al. (2022) looked at seventeen physician-training studies. Doctors who took autism classes also gained knowledge and confidence. Rocha’s online module mirrors that success with college students instead of clinicians.
Strang et al. (2017) first showed low-cost video training can work in Brazil. Rocha extends that idea from parents of young children to the general university population.
Why it matters
You now have free, validated Portuguese scales you can give to school staff, families, or college peers before your next autism workshop.
The whole course is online and short, so you can send the link today and see attitude change tomorrow. Use it as a quick primer while you build deeper acceptance programs in your setting.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
To promote the full inclusion of autistic people, we must change the knowledge and attitudes of non-autistic individuals. Unfortunately, access to autism information and support remains limited in Brazil, and stigma is also common. Brazilian researchers reached out to a researcher in the United States to co-develop Brazilian surveys to measure autism stigma and knowledge. Together, they made Brazilian versions of stigma and knowledge surveys which autistic people in the United States had helped make. They also adapted an online autism training used in other countries with help from three Brazilian autistic people and the mother of an autistic child. They used the new measures to see if the autism training improved autism stigma and knowledge among Brazilians. The surveys, called EARPA and ECAT in Brazil, were translated into Portuguese in a previous study. In the first study in this article, 532 Brazilians completed the stigma measure and 510 completed the knowledge measure. The researchers used exploratory graph analysis, which uses the connections between items in a survey to understand which items belong together. Seventy-nine Brazilians participated in the training. They were mostly white, female university students. The EGA showed that the stigma survey measured one big idea while the knowledge survey measured four ideas: diagnosis/cause; socio-communicative development; stimming and special interests; and autism in adulthood. Both scales are promising and may be helpful in future Brazilian and cross-cultural studies about autism. Participants reported more knowledge and less stigma after the autism training, which has been found in other countries too.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2024 · doi:10.1177/13623613231168917