Our Mission

CAIRN is a group of clinicians, researchers, parents, professionals, policy makers, and others in Canada who are concerned with the well-being of children with autism spectrum disorders. We have come together to pool our knowledge, experience, and wisdom in order to

• develop a national research agenda in intervention and early identification in autism spectrum disorders
  
  
• promote research into intervention, early identification, and diagnosis
  
  
• advocate for better intervention services across Canada for children with autism spectrum disorders that incorporate practices from the best available evidence.
  
  
• press for better training for physicians and front-line clinicians, and for education of the general public about autism spectrum disorders
  
  
• research the best intervention trial designs, promote education about randomized controlled trials, and encourage the use of meaningful and rigorously measured outcomes in interventions research
  
  
• investigate and adopt the best methods for the dissemination of our findings
  
  
• provide an evidence-based Web site for use by researchers, professionals, parents, policy makers, and laypersons

We will carry out our mission by

• sustaining the collaboration we have forged by continual free exchange of information and sharing of expertise, motivated by the best interests of affected children,

• generating and disseminating evidence-based information on autism spectrum disorders by using a sensitive search strategy to identify pertinent research studies and posting the results on the CAIRN Web site for use by all CAIRN members and the general public,
  
  
• eliciting feedback from the community as a means of generating new questions to be addressed in a scientific manner, and by
  
  
• developing research proposals for submission to granting agencies

thereby reinforcing the repeating cycle of defining the research agenda/carrying out the research/disseminating the findings/receiving feedback/refining(defining) the research agenda (The Research Iterative Loop) that provides structure for our endeavours.