Data processing notice - The experiences of autistic people with masks

Hannah Hobson, Anna Clegg and Jade Wood, at the University of York, are conducting a project into the experiences of autistic people wearing masks, and interacting with others who are wearing masks. We plan to design a questionnaire for autistic people about this topic. To inform the development of the questionnaire, we are first examining a sample of public social media posts about this topic. This project has received ethical review from our Department’s Ethics Committee.

We will search TikTok and Twitter for a total of 100 posts that are made by autistic people, on the topic of masks (which we will find by using keywords such as mask and autism, etc). Only posts that are able to be publicly accessed will be included. If the information in the posts, or a person’s bio, suggests that they are under the age of 18 years, we will not include their posts. We do not intend to initiate any direct contact with the original posters of the social media posts.

When extracting the posts, any identifying content will be removed, and light paraphrasing will also be employed. This is to make sure no individual posts could be later identified in any reports.

Below are two flow diagrams that visually summarise our search and handling process. There is also a longer Data Processing Notice, with more detail available here.

If you have any questions, please email hannah.hobson@york.ac.uk

How we find and decide what posts to include:

What happens to posts included in our analysis: