“The refusal to fit into boxes”: Interview findings on ADHD and neurodiversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What do people with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) think about neurodiversity? How does it affect what they do? While a burgeoning body of scholarship has examined the concept of neurodiversity, this work has often restricted its focus to autism, or addressed more general ideas about neurodivergence. Little existing research explores what neurodiversity means to people with ADHD. This paper presents a subset of findings from a multimethod project on how people use the language and concept of neurodiversity. We examined 11 interviews with diverse participants living in Southern Ontario who all identified as having ADHD, which we analyzed using an institutional ethnographic approach. Participants shared a diverse range of ideas, feelings, relationships, and experiences with neurodiversity. For some, neurodiversity was an integral aspect of their identity or provided useful language to advocate and educate, while others expressed uncertainty or discomfort with adopting this identity. Diagnosis was highlighted as a particularly complex issue without clear agreement. We found that people understood neurodiversity through their experiences of community, especially within online and activist circles. Those who did feel connected with neurodiversity described it as an empowering lens with which to organize their lives. People with ADHD have important insights to share about neurodiversity that can inform needed changes across social domains such as education, employment, identity, and activism. We consider the implications of these findings for future research and practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".