Krysia Waldock
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Autism and Theology podcast. I'm Krysia and it's great that you've joined us this week. This podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology, sharing relevant resources and promoting ways that faith and non-faith communities enable autistic people to flourish, the podcast is run from the University of Aberdeen's Centre for Autism and Theology, which we're shortened to Cat. And if you'd like to access the transcript for this episode, it can be found in the link in the show notes today we have Dr. Katy Unwin speaking with us. Katy is a Lecturer in Psychological Science at La Trobe University in Australia and has recently worked with CAT director Leon Van Ommen on a project exploring autistic and non-autistic sensory experiences of church services. So welcome, Katy.
Katy Unwin
Thanks Krysia. It's lovely to be here.
Krysia Waldock 1:04
Fantastic. And I wondered, is it so I have two kind of starting questions and I wondered firstly, what led you to undertake this research with Leon and also if for any listeners that aren't perhaps so up to date or kind of au fait with what sensory differences might be for autistic people? Maybe I could have a couple of sentences for that on that just to bring everybody up to speed.
Katy Unwin 1:31
Sure. I mean it's a great question and both questions are related. So I'll start by answering the second first, because that's how it makes sense of why I started working with Leon. So sensory differences in autism we we think we're not entirely sure as a field, we think impacts about 90% of autistic people. So it's a really big experience and we all know that the world is sensory and the way that we engaged in the world is through our sensory system. And so when we have a sensory system that might be working a little bit differently, it can cause problems. Now autistic people have told us that sometimes it can be good, right? It can produce good things, but often unfortunately we see that it limits things in life, like participation in particular activities or schooling, or, you know, just daily life. So that was really the, the reason why I wanted to get involved in this research with Leon was because we could see that these sensory differences were a real barrier to autistic people engaging in church. And yet so little research had been done in this area. All we really knew at that point was that likely autistic people would be struggling at churches because autistic people had anecdotally told us that. But we wanted to look into it in a really scientifically rigorous way so that we could generalize the findings.
Krysia Waldock
Super. And I'm guessing what might be really helpful now is to know what the main findings of the work you did with Leon?
Katy Unwin
Yeah, absolutely. And you will have to forgive me, Krysia. I'm getting over a throat infection. That's why I'm a bit croaky. But you know me, I said to you earlier. Maybe it'll make me sound a bit more interesting, so that's fine. Forgive me, everyone.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin 3:16
Yeah, absolutely. So actually, you know Leon and I have undertaken a series of studies across the years. Two of them have been qualitative. One of them have been quantitative as a quantitative scientist in psychology, I will stick to what I know, which is the quantitative, and I will leave Leon to talk about the qualitative. But yeah, we had this idea of running a study to just try and get an idea about how autistic people were experiencing church based on their sensory differences. And our paper is free to read online. So I'm sure we can find a way of posting a link if you want to fact check what I'm saying, the paper for those of you who may be aware, has been peer reviewed, which means that independent people have read the science and have agreed that the science is legitimate and that we can trust the findings. So what did we do? Well, we got 299 people to fill out a whole series of questionnaires for us.
Half of them were non autistic and then half of them were autistic, either with a formal diagnosis - that was about 150 ish. And then the rest of the sample didn't have a formal diagnosis, but suspected they were autistic or a self-diagnosed autistic.
So they completed these questionnaires for us and these questionnaires spanned a whole range of topics. But what I'm going to talk about today is a questionnaire that we created ourselves to try and look at sensory experiences within church. And it was a 44 item questionnaire. And I analyse the findings statistically. And so now the findings, I'm going to share with you are phrased in such a way as they are legitimate based on the sent the statistical analysis that I've done. So we can know this pretty sure because we've run the numbers and this is what we're finding. So. Compared to autistic, non-autistic people, our autistic sample experienced significantly more sensory barriers in church services. So within the church service, they are having lots of barriers across the service that are sensory that are stopping them from engaging.
But fascinatingly, we also found that they felt more connected to God when they felt in control of the sensory and the social aspects of the service. So that's interesting. So not only did we identify some barriers that were sensory, but also we identified that something that actually facilitated their engagement was at least feeling control of the sensory environment in control of the social environment. But we also found that across the board, across our autistic and our non-autistic participants. They all had similar enjoyment of some sensory aspects of the service, and what we take from this is that it's not that autistic people are going to church and just hating every sensory aspect of everything. No, it's more nuanced than that. They do enjoy some things. Just other things were really inhibitory for them. And then the final thing that we found was that unfortunately. The sensory environment was actually making attending church really difficult for autistic people and even stopped some autistic people from attending.
Krysia Waldock
It doesn't surprise me, especially from my own experiences in autistic person, especially particularly with noise, in particular in the complexity of noise. And I found that a real barrier. I’m wondering if there were any findings that came out of the work you did with Leon that did surprise you or you and Leon?
Katy Unwin
Well, The funny thing, Krysia is that. No, we found exactly what we thought we would find. But that is so rare in science. So when we when we run the studies that we want to run, we do it in a way that is, you know, methodologically sound and tries to remove all bias tries to remove all things that really we think about.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
Oh, we're desperate to find this. We're just going to go and search for this. That's not how it works.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
And so the fact that we actually found. Exactly what we kind of thought we would probably find. It’s fascinating and does suggest that we've hit upon something that actually is probably quite important. It had quite a big effect size to use that school language.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah. And I guess a really self indulgent question for me would be would be the kind of the qualitative work of the interviews and the talking to people that Leon did and the number crunching, the quantitative work that you did, they say some of the same things or what aredifferences between the two?
Katy Unwin
Yeah, so such a great question. Again, complete concordance really.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
So you know, the quantitative has removed the richness. That's probably the only way I would describe it. So you know, the quantitative has given us these these figures and these statements that we can say statistically. And we know then that we can generalize it to a larger group of people than our qualitative studies. But you know, the qualitative studies were significantly more rich. And they gave us more detail. And so that was a big difference because some of the things that the autistic participants told us in the qualitative studies were things we never would have thought of as neurotypical.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
So I you know, coming to this, I'm a neurotypical researcher. I'm deeply passionate about supporting autistic flourishing, and whatever way that looks like through understanding sensory differences. And. You know that limits me, right? So there is…
There are things that I just don't think about because it's not part of my experience.
The qualitative studies were fabulous because they gave us these rich insights into things that people were experiencing. For example, you you made the point about noise a minute ago, so you know in the field in psychology, we talk about, you know, autistic people. Sometimes some individuals will experience, you know hyper responsivity to noise, so you know a system which over amplifies noise for them and make it really uncomfortable. And that's just kind of where we stop and then we just move on, talk about something else. Whereas in our qualitative study, we actually found participants talking about, it wasn't always necessarily about the service being too loud or too quiet, but instead it was about discordant sound. So like you know, that thing that someone does when they go up to a microphone and it goes, you know, and it like it like reverberates. They said that that was really unpleasant.
Krysia Waldock
Yes.
Katy Unwin
And also they said that if there are like 2 speakers. And the two speakers are slightly off. One is louder than the other, then that's really unpleasant. And then again, they said if the person singing at the front or speaking at the front in some way is off key or kind of off tempo or whatever, then that again is really problematic. So what we see from the qualitative studies are these deep, nuanced understandings, which is like, yeah, OK, noise inverted commas was a problem, but actually it's so much deeper than that. It's about discordance as well.
Krysia Waldock
It really is, and I think certainly some of the conversations I've had with the church that I went to was often understand in terms of noise and turning the volume up and down rather than the real complexity and the richness, which is why I was particularly interested to.
Katy Unwin
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
See kind of the difference between the two, because I think people often come at it from autistic people are either more or less sensitive and not necessarily understanding how everything fits together as a whole picture and it's that which then?
Katy Unwin
Exactly. Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
Explains what's going on for us.
Katy Unwin
Exactly. You know, as a perceptual scientist, one of the world background of perceptual science. Anyway, one of the things that we currently haven't published the results yet, so I won't talk too much about it. But one of the things we found in a follow up study is that we know that sound has different properties, right? Sound isn't just one unit of thing that enters our ears. Actually sound is made-up of any number of different things, including the air pressure.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
Including the frequency, right and so our incredible human brains can take those component parts and make them into what we call sound, but actually it's it's not by any means simple. And so what was fascinating for me Krysia was that I know that as a perceptual scientist, and yet the people with lived experience our qualitative studies were also telling us that right without any none of them had any background in perceptual science, right.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
So we know that there must be something going on there about the complexity of sound and it's really when we start engaging in that more as a field.
Krysia Waldock
Definitely. And I guess almost this leads on to kind of the next question that I had, which is do you think we need more interdisciplinary work within the field of autism religion? And as somebody who is very interdisciplinary and how I work and I can applaud for him, sociology, psychology and religious studies, I’m very pro this. I wonder what your thoughts on this were.
Katy Unwin
Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm probably equally pro and therefore biased because I do it a lot, right? So if I didn't think it was important, I wouldn't do it.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
But you know, your question is really, really personal, because I think what's really comfortable is that we just stay in our field, right? We just say, look, this is the way I was trained. These are the things that I believe about knowledge and how we gather knowledge and therefore I'm just going to sit here and do good work. Now, look, that's fine. That work will probably be good. And it'll be useful. Question. What if you engage with another field? What if you allowed the nuances of that field? The knowledge of that field, the methods of that field to impact you and your thinking? Because I can say hand on heart that the projects that Leon and I have done.
Are all the more rich, provide all the more information, all the more interesting because we have two different fields within them as opposed to what if I was to go and do this research without Leon and perhaps vice versa as well? So I think it's really really important because at the end of the day. Humans are complex.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
If we weren't complex, we wouldn't be studying all this stuff, right?
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
No single field has all the answers. So what is the answer? Well, quality work needs to be done in an interdisciplinary way so that we can start to get at this human complexity, which is part of our daily lives.
Krysia Waldock
You basically summed up basically what I spent quite a bit of time in my viva, saying, and when my PhD as to why religious studies just work so well with critical autism studies in other parts of social sciences, and I guess my question back to you is how
Katy Unwin
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
Can we facilitate this? Because I guess the thing I've certainly faced in the work I've done is, and obviously people at CAT are wonderful and they're really forward thinking. But I have to find sometimes that theologians stay in their lane and sociologists in their lane.
Katy Unwin
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
And it can be really difficult to get things going.
Katy Unwin
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you've hit on the hardest question of all. Because, yeah, I mean, I will admit I worked with Leon. Now for gosh, I don't know, 3-4 years and yeah, it's not all been smooth. And he says this himself as well. It's been hard because we come from. We don't just use different different languages as it were, right? We speak in English, but we're both trained in such different fields that we we just speak in different languages in some ways.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
So that's not only the problem, but we also have, you know, to go a bit philosophical, we have different understandings of what knowledge is and how we get knowledge and what knowledge means.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
And so you'd think, well, it's just philosophy that doesn't impact the day-to-day, turns out the kind of work we're doing, it does impact it. So yeah, what is the way forward? Well, I guess something that we've really found is so important is open communication, so mutual respect at all times and just talking things out.
So when stuff maybe isn't perhaps going well, there's an issue that's jarring talking it out.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
Explain from your perspective. Let the other person explain both sides listen really well, and then I guess this is probably the most important thing. Keep focused on the main goal. Like what is your main goal as a team and how are you going to get there instead of focusing on the minutiae or the the particular bits of difference? Or I'm really angry because he's different from.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
And this. No, don't do that. Don't get hit up on that. Instead, keep the main goal in mind. Why are we doing this? Well, we're doing this because we want autistic people to be able to flourish. So we're going to put aside all of this interdisciplinary disagreement we've got, and we're going to try and make decisions together that we both understand. I say that fully knowing how complicated it is.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah, I mean, I guess from also sometimes I find some people are just more up for working across different boundaries than others naturally. So I guess there's obviously I think we're very much of the kind of beginner be in that camp. And then there's almost got to be an appeal for people to see the benefit of working together as well.
Katy Unwin
Absolutely. This is it exactly. I mean, podcasts like this are a great way of showing that. I hope the papers that we produce that you produce, we produce other people in the interdisciplinary world produce. Hopefully will form part of that, but also.
Be strategic and who you talk to and how you talk to them so you know when I I've worked with theologians for long enough now that when I meet someone who's a theologian, I try and talk a bit of their language. I'm like, look, I'm not some al.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
From science I get where you're coming from. We may have some differences, but hey, look, we actually have some similarities here. And what are the similarities?
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin 17:45
Well, let's go back to Western philosophy, right? In some ways, the beginning of modern day science, like theologians engage with Western philosophy all the time.
Psychology actually engages in Western philosophy, right? It's where we kind of started. So maybe let's start at this mutual point and try and win them over to the idea that actually we're Better Together than we are apart.
Krysia Waldock
Definitely. And I wondered also if there's any practical takeaways that churches could take from some of the really fantastic work that Leon and yourself have done together over the years.
Katy Unwin
Thanks. I mean, you know, it's so hard, Krysia, because there's one thing as a scientist I struggle with because I always want more evidence, more evidence, more evidence, right.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
I'm like, oh, we don't know enough yet. But based on what we do know, here's what I'd like to recommend. First thing is let's all be talking about this. So bring the issue of sensory differences amongst all of us, but particularly in monks, neurodivergent people out into the open without judgement. Do this in the church spaces and try and get on the same page. How? How are we all going to get on the same page?
Leon and I have created a series of Bible studies to try and support small groups in talking through the different sensory experiences we see in the Bible in the hope we can start to get some conversations going. So I'm sure you guys will be able to access that very soon. It's about to be published, and we've also had some great work from Henna, who's helped us to bring those together. And then I suppose the other thing to remember is that there is no one size or fits all approach, so every individual is different. If you're a church pastor or leader listening, please don't just go and turn the volume down in your church to help everyone, because that likely isn't going to solve anything. But you know, go and speak to the person who is leading the church. Or if you are leading the church, speak to people in your congregation and just find out from them what's going on. Listen well and try and come to a point that might try and help both sides and then I guess this is a really key thing. We would love people to start making really kind of theologically considered. Accommodations within church services. And using centres in church services, right? Because we are in no way advocating for what the wonderful Joanna Leidenhag, a theologian has said, has called sensory whitewashing right, where we just take out every sensory element of a church service just because it's not good for everyone. No. In our study, we found that the autistic people just like the non autistic people really gained benefit from a whole bunch of sensory experiences.
So use the senses, but use them in a theologically considered way and being mindful of who's in your crowd. Final thing, that finding about having control. So having control over the sensory in the social aspects of the service, supported autistic engagement. Try and find ways yourself. If you're autistic of getting that control, or if you're a supporter of of people in your church, try and find ways of giving control. What might that look like? Well. The Congregation on board with this idea that there should be no judgement when someone wants to take control over their environment and leave and then come back and leave and then come back, or if they want to take control of their environment and start moving around a little. If you can buy some headphones at work for you, find some. You know there's like loop ear plugs. They might work for you just to give you that sense of agency that when you're sitting there, you can just all of a sudden put them on, get that sense. Of control back and then engage potentially. More than anything, Krysia, the main thing I would just love to be saying on this is that we just all need to be mindful of it and lovingly caring for each other in that by listening really well.
Krysia Waldock
And I think that's the one thing that when I was listening to, I was going. Yes, you know, the churches that I've both gone and spoke to people in the research I've done and from my own experiences in churches throughout my life, I think certainly one church I was in. I remember I used to get really, really anxious and this is before I got headphones and took back control and I think it's been since I've took that control that I've been able to effectively call the shots a bit more and feel much more comfortable and in control, and able to engage better. But I used to get really nervous sitting on my own.
Katy Unwin
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
I remember a couple of people getting really quite judgmental at my dad. For him, staying with me at the beginning of the church service when people kind of milling around like and doing what they do kind of going out to people and talking to each other and do, kind of doing the church back rub and shaking hands and all the other stuff that goes on and and I just felt so uncomfortable being judged. But actually knowing that actually.
Katy Unwin
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Krysia Waldock
That's part of them. And actually, it's how we we need to be open minded. And also giving agency to autistic people as well through things like the headphones and loops. I mean, loop ear plugs have been life changing for me, quite frankly.
Katy Unwin
Yeah, awesome. Fab, yeah.
Krysia Waldock
So and I know that I also have a big pair of almost like builder ones. I put over the top of my head. No, like kids have. And they've also been really, really helpful, especially when, because where I currently live, we live right next to a couple of doors down from a corner shop and every Monday morning, 10:00.
There's a lorry that unloads.
Katy Unwin
Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
So I guess it's also kind of the things of actually, although that isn't necessarily to do with church. I know I have my headphones there ready and I have in ear in ear, kind of wired ones instead of my kind of wireless ones so I can continue doing what I want to do so I can make that give that agency.
Katy Unwin
That's it. Is it?
Krysia Waldock
So I think that agency thing is just the thing that really struck me is just so important, really. And it's not about putting the onus onto the autistic person.
Katy Unwin
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
About giving as an autistic person is giving me choice to do what I want to do without judgement.
Katy Unwin
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's giving the control back. Yeah. And again, fascinatingly, this idea is actually littered throughout the autism literature without a lot of people knowing it with, I suppose, theories of of basically what's going on for autistic people in the brain.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
So we think about things like Bayesian predictive coding theory. So I talk a little bit about it in the paper. If you're interested in that, it's not out of the blue, this idea that actually having control seems to be beneficial exactly as you've described it, and I actually some empirical work during my PhD on this exactly. And I found again exactly that that it just did seem beneficial. So all of these pieces of evidence are sort of coming together to make us realise that actually there must be something here.
So let's go for it, you know, try and get back that control. If you are an autistic person in your service, speak to people. You need to speak to.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
Have headphones on hand. Have whatever you need on hand to help you feel in that moment that you have the agency to do what you need in order to engage in that service.
Krysia Waldock
And I guess my final question is what directions are there for future research from what you've done with Leon and where do you think the research on your experiences for autistic people in church should go next?
Katy Unwin
I mean, that's just the best question ever, because anywhere is the answer because so little has been done.
Krysia Waldock
Yeah.
Katy Unwin
You know what Leon and I have done is really, genuinely a drop in the ocean, so really there needs to be broadly as a field that needs to be more research and there needs to be a commitment to high quality research. Let's not be bothering with this rubbish stuff that doesn't really tell us anything that's poorly controlled. Let's make sure that we're doing well controlled studies that give us good evidence that really can support autistic people. Leon and I recently got a set of funding with a group more broadly to explore how non and minimally verbal autistic people can actually engage in church and engage in spiritual life. Because these people are often the unheard voices of our of our research. Only 2% of psychological research in 2019 was done on non speaking autistic people. 2% you know, 98% was done on everyone else autistic. So we need to start listening to those unheard voices, and we need to find out how they engage in church because they do. But we want to know more about that to be able to support them or to so that's where we're going just for now.
Krysia Waldock
And I guess also the thing that strikes me is when we talk about including people who use language differently, or who who are non speakers, or who communicate with different means as well. It almost challenges how we can do research as well and away from a paradigm of the backwards and forwards interview or the psychological questionnaire. We can actually really decolonialise and deconstruct what we're doing and learn so much more about.
Katy Unwin
Exactly. Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
What it means to be human and what it means? What knowledge is as well?
Katy Unwin
Exactly. Krysia, we are absolutely doing this because we really are passionate about autistic people and particularly those who just don't have a voice in the in the debate at the moment. But also there is this part of me that just is so excited to see what.
We find because there is something wonderful about this idea that, you know, religion, spirituality in the way that we describe it. It's so verbal, right? We're always talking about verbal, but we know about the ineffability of God. We know that in the Bible it says that the spirit intercedes for us with wordless groans. So, hang on. Intercession can happen without words. Interesting, right?
Krysia Waldock
Yeah
Katy Unwin
So there is something there. But what? What is it? We don't know. We want to try and unlock that.
Krysia Waldock
And I think that's just so important because I think although there obviously isn't always work that centres autistic people's experiences, there are just some people's expenses that are even less centred and actually we need to understand all autistic. There isn't one autistic experience in my understanding.
Katy Unwin
Yeah, exactly.
Krysia Waldock
There's lots of lots of different autistic lots of different autistic experiences. We need to find out about all of them
Katy Unwin
Oh yeah. Exactly. We need to do better all round.
Krysia Waldock
Exactly, completely agree. And I wondered, for anyone who wanted to get in contact with you or follow you on social media or anything like that if you have those kind of outlets.
Katy Unwin
Yeah.
Krysia Waldock
How's best to contact you? Follow you. Reach out.
Katy Unwin
Yeah, absolutely.I'd love to hear from you if you want to reach out. So my e-mail address is k.unwin@latrobe.edu.au. And I'd love to hear from you. I do have Twitter at @Katy_Unwin. I'm not very active and will be having a baby very soon, so will be even less active. But if you do want to try and reach out on there, please do. But the best way is e-mail and monitor that all the time.
Krysia Waldock
Super. So thank you so much to our listeners for joining Katy and I on this episode. If you have any questions, you can message us at autism theology on X or on Instagram or you can send us an e-mail at cat@abdn.ac.uk even if it's just to say hi, we'd love to hear from you.