Co-designing and Evaluating a Workplace Disability Disclosure Decision-aid Tool for Autistic Youth and Young Adults to Enhance Self-determination and Decision-making Skills
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disability that often presents as non-visible in the workplace; thus, autistic people have the choice of whether to disclose their autism at work. This disclosure decision-making process is complex and may be even more so for autistic youth and young adults who are newly entering the workforce. Little is known about their workplace disclosure experiences and no tools exist to support this decision-making process. The objectives of this knowledge translation (KT) grounded doctoral thesis were to: i) explore workplace disclosure needs, experiences, and influencers among autistic young people; ii) co-design, test the usability (ease of use, satisfaction, usefulness), and revise a prototype of an autism disclosure decision-aid tool; and iii) evaluate the revised tool in terms of its: impact on self-determination and decision-making capabilities; usability; feasibility; and acceptability. The first study involved six Zoom focus groups with 23 autistic young adults and findings revealed numerous influencers impacting disclosure needs and experiences; noteworthy factors include the workplace environment, fear of negative disclosure outcomes, and disclosure knowledge and skill gaps. The second study used co-design and patient-oriented research strategies and KT tool development literature to co-design the decision-aid prototype with four autistic collaborators. Usability testing involved four focus group / participatory design Zoom sessions with 19 autistic youth and young adults; findings were positive suggesting the prototype’s usability. Revisions addressed mainly the prototype’s ease of use. The third study used online pre-post surveys with 30 autistic youth and young adults. The tool was deemed usable, feasible, and acceptable; there were significant changes in decision-making capabilities, with impact on self-determination requiring future investigation. This thesis uncovered the disclosure experiences of autistic young people and produced a tangible disclosure decision-aid tool that may support navigation of disclosure processes. Future research should continue exploring autistic young peoples’ disclosure experiences and testing the tool to determine its effectiveness and potential for implementation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".