How Liberal Arts College Websites in the US Are (or Are Not) Discussing Autism

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,

Thank you for the paper. It was really interesting and I enjoy reading it. It brings a great contribution to the field of inclusion, in particular regarding representation and visibility of diversity.

Despite the simple design, the data is interesting and relevant. It brings relevant insights about the study problem and the authors provide relevant recommendations.

However, I think that the authors can improve the argument and the soundness of the paper. Please consider some suggestions here and in the document attached:

• Improve the introduction/Literature review making it more convincing and also including relevant concepts (e.g. representation, visibility) and studies (see more suggestions in the doc)
• Consider improve the results including more details (check suggestions in the doc)
• Provide more info about the context for an international audience
• Reflect on: As a reader, I think the paper is about autism representation (not disability - title; not neurodiverse - as in some parts in the text); it was my reading of the text. I think it should be clarify from the start or change it. I understand the ideas and why the authors use all the terms (that seems clear), but sometimes it was confusing about what the text is about and I was wondering if visibility does not require clarification about whom we are talking about.

I hope these suggestions can help improving the paper

Best,

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

• Improve the introduction/Literature review making it more convincing and also including relevant concepts (e.g. representation, visibility) and studies (see more suggestions in the doc)

We have added to the content of the literature review to provide more relevant definitions and to better reflect the current state of the field. We appreciate the time of the reviewer to offer the in-text suggestions as well and addressed each one in turn (e.g., expanding on “why liberal arts institutions specifically, ” and described more carefully other work on belongingness and representation on college campuses).

• Consider improve the results including more details (check suggestions in the doc)

We appreciate the comment here; we added a results section the looked across categories.

• Provide more info about the context for an international audience
• We have added more information and citations about why liberal arts institutions might be unique environemnts to study.
• Reflect on: As a reader, I think the paper is about autism representation (not disability - title; not neurodiverse - as in some parts in the text); it was my reading of the text. I think it should be clarify from the start or change it. I understand the ideas and why the authors use all the terms (that seems clear), but sometimes it was confusing about what the text is about and I was wondering if visibility does not require clarification about whom we are talking about.

We appreciate this comment, as this was a focus in our team discussions as well. We agree, that changing the title to read “autism” and then explaining why we also searched relevant terms more accurately represents the purpose of the paper.

I hope these suggestions can help improving the paper

 

PDF responses to Reviewer 1

Page 2:

Lines 46-47: We changed the title to reflect this feedback (summarized below)

Lines 63-64: We gave more context around why the context of a liberal arts college might provide different risks and benefits relating to stigma and disability.

 

Page 3:

Line 102: We added more information about the role of representation and belongingness into the literature review

Line 107: We included autism and neurodiversity as a more inclusive way to search for autism-related sources; we did not make changes to this sentence because we defined these terms earlier in the literature review.

 

Page 6:

Line 231: We intentionally did not name specific universities throughout the paper so did not include examples here.

Line 241/243: We have included more discussion of the intersectionality and representation in the introduction.

Line 245: We appreciate this feedback; we reviewed the results section with our scoring template and believe we have described most of the examples that we could. For the comment below, we added a few more descriptions of whether there were broader patterns to our findings but we unfortunately do not have much more to add to the current descriptions, given what was on the websites.

 

Page 8:

Line 312: We have augmented our liberal arts discussion in the introduction.

Line 318: We have moved this section to the discussion, thank you for this feedback.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review of the article “How Liberal Arts College Websites in the US Are (or Are Not) Discussing Invisible Disabilities”

1. The topic of the article is relevant and corresponds to the profile of the journal.
2. In the introduction, the authors substantiated the need to meet the needs of students with autism, the number of whom on university campuses is growing every year; they state that campuses lag behind in representing the needs of this group. Therefore, the study focuses on four-year liberal arts colleges, in particular, an analysis of the current state of their websites regarding the representation of autism and neurodiversity.
3. The authors have analyzed in detail the modern scientific literature on this issue and clearly pose the main question that is the subject of the study. It is positive that the article mentions the relatively new concept of neurodiversity and neurodifference in the educational environment of colleges.
4. This study is based on the analysis of a significant part of the materials on college websites, on the basis of which a conclusion was made about their insufficient representation of autism and neurodiversity. The conclusions are well-reasoned.
5. The language of the article is understandable. The text is clearly structured, all parts are organically connected in content.

Critical comments.

The article would be significantly strengthened by the results of the correlation: does the visibility of websites and their focus on people with different nosologies (for example, autism) affect the number of students in general and the percentage of students with disabilities (with autism) studying there (if this information is available). This statistical information would be interesting for the conclusions of the article.

In addition, it is important to track whether colleges with a lower rating (US World and News Report) pay more attention to presenting materials about neurodiversity and autism on their websites than, for example, colleges with a higher rating (is there a dependence, an influence?). Perhaps there is a difference in the presentation of inclusive topics on college websites, depending on their rating?

At the same time, in this context, there is obviously a difference between private and public colleges, which could also be highlighted in the text (perhaps private colleges are more likely to try to attract the attention of young people with informative websites about inclusion and diversity).

Conclusion.

In general, the article is written at an appropriate scientific level, has practical value (recommendations for staff on updating the websites of institutions).

I recommend making some additions to the text, after which the manuscript can be published.

 

Author Response

The article would be significantly strengthened by the results of the correlation: does the visibility of websites and their focus on people with different nosologies (for example, autism) affect the number of students in general and the percentage of students with disabilities (with autism) studying there (if this information is available). This statistical information would be interesting for the conclusions of the article.

We appreciate this comment and agree that this would add important context to this question. Unfortunately, the campus-specific rates of different neurodivergent conditions are not available and thus we can only extrapolate from broader findings. We did add a comment on this to make it more explicit in the introduction; a lack of measurement of this phenomenon is in part limiting progress in this area.

In addition, it is important to track whether colleges with a lower rating (US World and News Report) pay more attention to presenting materials about neurodiversity and autism on their websites than, for example, colleges with a higher rating (is there a dependence, an influence?). Perhaps there is a difference in the presentation of inclusive topics on college websites, depending on their rating?

We took a look at this but there were not significant correlations (we also took a look at broader patterns, e.g., was the top 50% of the list more likely to have mentions/resources, etc) and there were not meaningful differences; we included this in the results section.

At the same time, in this context, there is obviously a difference between private and public colleges, which could also be highlighted in the text (perhaps private colleges are more likely to try to attract the attention of young people with informative websites about inclusion and diversity).

We appreciate this comment and have added in more detail about how liberal arts institutional context might present different barriers to including more information about autism/neurodiversity.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors

Thank you for all the revisions.

Best

 

Author Response

n/a