“I always envisage it is a big spider web of things that might affect me in a sensory environment, and I want to say to people, it’s about actually looking at all those little things that build up…”
Member of the Focus group
In 2021 we ran a series of seven focus groups to learn more about public spaces that can be more difficult sensory environments as well as learning more about what makes those spaces more challenging and/or less accessible for autistic people. Visit our pages about each of the challenging locations to learn more about what people told us about each environment.
To analyse the data we used thematic analysis, which helped us to develop a series of 6 main themes and 15 subthemes that reflect the patterns we found in our data. Once we had created our initial ideas, we then hosted a feedback group for autistic people to further refine our ideas.
With the support of @21andsensory we designed a sensory web of the different principles that can make an environment more or less challenging. The outer edge of the web represents the more disabling end of the scale, whereas closer to the centre of the web represents the more enabling side.
People identified that different factors often overlap with one another and the combination of factors can lead to a space being more challenging. For each individual each factor may overlap in different ways to different extents. This means that each person’s perspective of a public place may be similar but each will be slightly different depending on their own needs, interests and experiences. People also reported that their perspectives about a place can also change over time (even during the same day).
We identified 6 different main themes and each of these themes had up to three subthemes. To learn more about each of these themes and subthemes, including questions to help businesses start to think about how you could better support autistic people in your spaces, click on the images below or find them in the ‘our findings’ tab.
We also explored whether these themes were also identified through questions on our social media channels. Learn more on our page comparing each of the themes identified on social media and in the focus groups.
Ethics Approval Reference: R74960/RE001
Sensory Street 