Additional Evidence is Needed to Recommend Acquiring a Dog to Families of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Response to Crossman and Kazdin

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We welcome the opportunity to comment on the letter of Crossman and Kazdin (2015) concerning our article “Acquiring a Pet Dog Significantly Reduces Stress of Primary Careers for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Prospective Case Control Study,” (Wright et al. 2015). The authors raise important points about both the scientific paradigms that should be used to make sense of complex problems such as those surrounding human animal interaction (HAI) research, as well as how we make scientific progress in emerging fields. They also highlight how scientific research is represented (or often misrepresented) by others. We thank the authors for recognising that our article moves the “notion of recommending pets to families of children with ASD from the domain of anecdote and intuition into the domain of empirical evidence” and the importance of this. We share some of their concerns, especially those relating to the wild claims of public media based on little, if any, evidence. However, our responsibility as scientists is to accurately report our results and then discuss their implications; the latter, by definition, involves speculation and is aimed at encouraging dialogue that extends the ideas, otherwise we would simply write a conclusion after our results and leave readers to consider the implications of our work on their own. The media have their own code for responsible reporting and the content of reports, other than direct quotes, is often outside of our control. Nonetheless, we feel this should not be used as an excuse to refuse engagement with popular media, since our mission is to disseminate knowledge widely and not purely for the benefit of academics. Indeed there is a very important debate to be had about the public representation and understanding of science and their support for it as a useful deployment of public funds, which is beyond the scope of this response. …