Methodology

Honestly, I don’t really have a good introduction to segway into this, so let’s just jump right into the meat.

Movie Selection Criteria

Criteria 1: The Movie must be following the publication of DSM 3 (where autism was first formally introduced), in 1980
Criteria 2: The Movie must have Autism as either a central point or of genuine plot relevance
Criteria 3: Must be at least one film for each decade from 1980 to the present day

Film Rating System:

The primary system follows Stephen P. Safran’s film analysis guide, which was published in his paper Using Movies to Teach Students about Disabilities. This paper follows why and how teachers should use various films to teach students about various disabilities and contains both guidelines for the teacher to select the film and a questionnaire for students to fill out, asking them to rate depictions on a Likert scale and other questions. For the purposes of this research, just the rating part should suffice.

Rating Questions:

Please respond to each of these statements in the space provided based upon your viewing of the film. Provide an example whenever applicable.
Provide a score 1-5, and provide an example:

Positive Representations

    The person with a disability…

• Has a complex personality, with a full range of emotions. _____

• Interacts as equal. _____

• Is part of the mainstream, for example, holds a job, is a family member, or a student in a general education class. _____

• Is featured as an “extra” who happens to have a disability. _____

• Is portrayed as an ordinary person without superhuman abilities. _____

• Provides insight into societal barriers. _____

• Is shown in loving relationship and expresses age-appropriate sexual needs. _____

Negative Representations

   The person with a disability is …

• Pitiable and pathetic. _____
• Object of violence. _____

• Sinister or evil. _____

• “Superhuman” in abilities or effect on others _____

• Subject of humor _____

• A burden. _____

• Lives separated from mainstream society. _____

Each film will be scored with these guidelines. Unfortunately, rating the overall film as a “good portrayal” or a “bad portrayal” would still be overly vague without a set criteria, and Safran’s work does not include a way to rate the overall film. Luckily, in a research by V. Sue Atkinson, they make use of the same guidelines (but for TV shows), and classify movies as an overall good representation or bad representation by taking the mean of the positive representation scores and subtracting the mean of the negative representation scores from it. An overall negative score implies a poor representation, and a positive score implies a good representation.

Analysis/Trend Analyzing:

Ultimately, 2 things will be analyzed:
1. general trend of movies, for this, just seeing the trend of the overall movie scores would be enough, if I see the general scores go from -1 to +3, I can say overall, movies have gotten better representations. (I expect to see no change in this portion, ie, -1 will still be -1)
2. Specific Trends: Analyze the trends for the individual scores in the guidelines, I.e, how has “object of violence” changed over the years.
3. Qualitative Trends: i.e, “superhuman abilities” have gone from showing a ton of savantism to a weirdly supernatural influence on others’ behaviors.

And that, good friends, dear readers, and gentle listeners, is my methodology.