How do children co-create play interaction? Cultural frameworks for collaboration

The aim of the project is to explore how children draw on cultural frameworks when they co-create play interactions in their everyday lives. The project focuses on play among children on the autism spectrum. Research on real life peer interaction and play from autistic children's own perspective is surprisingly scarce. Children's everyday lives take place in a number of different contexts, i.e. home(s), preschools, after-school activities, and homes of friends and family, each of which make up micro-cultures with their own norms, rules, and practices. The project uses ethnographic methods and interaction analysis to explore how children make sense of cultural similarities and differences across contexts when they cocreate the structures of everyday play interactions. Deepening our understanding of children's natural collaborative strategies is crucial if we want to improve social participation and citizenship to better include people on the autsim spectrum in our society.