Det kunde vara kaos på ovanvåningen och jag kunde stå och laga mat

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this qualitative study was to research how people's experience of having a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder affected their upbringing. We held six semi-structured interviews where we examined three different aspects of the participants’ lives in regard to their upbringing and sibling. 1: Their relationship with their sibling. 2: Their role in the family. 3: What kind of support they received. From our results, we were able to identify four themes that we analyzed with the help of Antonovsky's KASAM theory and Goffman's theoretical term role. 1: The love between the siblings. 2: The lack of support. 3: The responsibility role the participants had taken during their upbringing. 4: The difficulties the participants had in expressing their emotions. The results showed that the participants had an enormous amount of love for their siblings which helped them tackle a lot of challenges they faced. One of these challenges was the responsibility they shouldered, that was a role most happily took on. The majority of the participants agreed that the support they received was lacking especially from society and they would have wanted more. They also described how they would have liked their parents to have more reinforcement in offering them help and not just their sibling. An observation we concluded from the result was that all six participants had difficulties in opening up about their own feelings and needs. The biggest takeaway from the study was that more research is needed and there are things that the social sector can improve on to help make the people that have a sibling with autism spectrum disorder thrive.