Leveraging Academic-Community Partnerships to Engage Families of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Research

It is important to engage children with ASD and the families that support them in research. However, it is often challenging for researchers to engage this population in time- and/or labor-intensive research due to the many barriers caregivers of children with ASD face. From a researcher's perspective, this challenge ultimately inhibits research designs and compromises the learning and understanding needed to identify meaningful research questions, solve relevant problems, and implement solutions into practice. One way researchers can support families with ASD to participate in research is through the building of academic-community partnerships. Academic-community partnerships can serve as both a solution to increasing participation in research and a complementary practice benefiting the child with ASD throughout the research process. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to describe how researchers might leverage academic-community partnerships to effectively engage children and families of children with ASD in research.