Improving the Validity and Generalizability of Adult Autism Research Through Incorporating Family and Cultural Contexts.

The relatively nascent empirical knowledge base regarding autism in adulthood provides an opportunity to adopt a contextual approach that conceptualizes autism features, outcomes, and supportive services as interactions between the characteristics of the condition and contextual factors across the life course. Although a contextual approach encompasses many aspects of a person's identity and social ecology, we focus here on the closely interrelated family and cultural contexts, which have been poorly integrated into adult autism research. We argue that designing studies with attention to context (e.g., family and culture) will improve the relevance and comprehensiveness of findings, which in turn will improve construct validity and provide a more accurate understanding of autism-related outcomes in adulthood. Similarly, designing and/or selecting measures that have been validated with culturally and linguistically diverse samples will improve the utility of findings and reduce spurious or null effects. More contextually informed methodologies will lead to improved generalizability and practical applications of findings. We offer concrete guidance regarding how to increase the social ecological perspective within adult autism research as it relates to study conceptualization, methodology, and measurement.