My name is David Jackson-Perry, and this is the site for my PhD thesis about autistic people’s experiences of sexuality, which I completed at the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University, Belfast in 2023. You can download the full thesis here.
You can see more about my approach to this study specifically in my mission statement, which also includes some resources about participatory research, sexuality, and gender, and in the study overview. You can see my publications relating to autism and neurodiversity here. I also publish (in French and English) around HIV, and you can find a list of all my publications here.
Although I am neurodivergent, with a diagnosis of ADHD, I am not autistic, so it was important to me to consult autistic people to help make this study as relevant, accessible, and respectful as possible. I therefore recruited a research advisory group (the RAG), made up of nine autistic advisors who were willing to provide input into this research. You can read more about the RAG here.
I then carried out an online survey, mainly to find out what autistic adults wanted to see researched in the area of sexuality, and the most accessible ways of carrying out interviews, although I was also interested in the sexual and gender identities of autistic people responding to calls for online research around sexuality. 567 autistic adults from 28 different countries completed the survey. You can see more about the survey, including some results, here.
Finally, leaning on results of the survey to guide me with questions and methods, I carried out in-depth, mostly written interviews, with 16 autistic adults with a variety of intimate, sexual, and gender identities. You can read more about these interviews here.