Perspective: The role of diversity advisory boards in autism research.

This article suggests that autism research needs to include more people from different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds. The authors recommend creating special advisory groups to help researchers include more diverse participants and make sure research addresses the needs of all autistic people, not just some groups.

This perspective article advocates for establishing diversity advisory boards in autism research to address underrepresentation of racial, ethnic, and gender diverse autistic individuals. The authors argue these boards would serve three key functions: ensuring researchers intentionally address diversity issues, improving recruitment of diverse participants, and considering diverse contexts to enhance intervention effectiveness in community settings. The paper presents arguments for why diversity advisory boards are necessary and provides guidance on how to form and implement them in autism research and intervention development.

While promising in concept, diversity advisory boards require empirical validation. If implemented, they could potentially improve research inclusivity and intervention generalizability, but their actual impact on participant diversity and intervention outcomes remains to be demonstrated through systematic evaluation.

This is a perspective article presenting arguments rather than empirical data. No evidence is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of diversity advisory boards, and specific implementation details or evaluation methods are not thoroughly described.

This article argues that using groups of individuals that specifically focus on addressing issues with diversity in autism research and autism intervention development are key in ensuring that a greater amount of racial, ethnic, and gender diverse autistic individuals are included in the research and that the research is addressing the needs of these individuals and groups. We call these groups a diversity advisory board. A diversity advisory board will help improve diversity in autism research and intervention development by making sure that autism researchers (1) are intentional about addressing issues of diversity in their research and (2) are able to recruit a greater number of autistic individuals with diverse identities, and (3) by giving greater consideration to the context of diverse autistic individuals which will help autism-focused interventions work better in community settings. We give a short description of these arguments and ideas for how to form and use a diversity advisory board.