Thanks to everybody who took part. Now it’s time to see the results. I’ve counted up everyone’s agreements and disagreements (using some amount of reading between the lines. I didn’t count any that were unclear). The ‘autistic’ answer for each statement is indicated with bold type:
| statement | agree | disagree |
|---|---|---|
| I often notice small sounds when others do not. | 23 | 0 |
| When I’m reading a story, I find it difficult to work out the characters’ intentions. | 5 | 1 |
| I find it easy to “read between the lines” when someone is talking to me. | 0 | 6 |
| I usually concentrate more on the whole picture, rather than the small details. | 0 | 4 |
| I know how to tell if someone listening to me is getting bored. | 2 | 4 |
| I find it easy to do more than one thing at once. | 1 | 4 |
| I find it easy to work out what someone is thinking or feeling just by looking at their face. | 1 | 5 |
| If there is an interruption, I can switch back to what I was doing very quickly. | 3 | 4 |
| I like to collect information about categories of things. | 5 | 2 |
| I find it difficult to work out people’s intentions. | 4 | 0 |
So, lemmy.world/autism picked the autistic option every time and scored a perfect 10/10. Interestingly, if we weight it proportionately according to how many picked each option, we only get 6.2, barely over the threshold.
Scores of 6 or over indicate possible autism spectrum disorder, so lemmy.world/autism should seriously consider the possibility that they may be autistic.
(Personally, I got 8. Go me!)
My intentions for running this test was it would be interesting and fun, and I think it was (One respondent was concerned I might have some undisclosed professional interest - I don’t, but thanks for looking out for the community). I think the main takeaway is that interpreting self-report questions can be really hard.
Should I do another? If so, should I do anything differently?
Yeah, I think doing the longer, standardized tests would mostly just be going over the same points again in slightly different wording. And the drop in responses over time suggests that one question per day might be a bit too much.
There’s a couple of tests that cover slightly different ground. There’s one about masking that I think is not too long. Also one about monotropic attention, and I think one about demand avoidance. I’m going to think about it and leave some breathing room before jumping in with another.
I’d be curious about the demand avoidance one! It apparently affects most people with autism (per my therapist anyway) but no one really mentions it and I’d be curious to learn more.
Here’s the test I was thinking of https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc0eFJV5wJzJAw2R9ii2ts_cfTZ8mGKcsdWnehz-XATOSFs3w/viewform
And turns out it’s 50 questions, so I don’t think it would be ideal for the question-a-day format. If you’re interested in a similar sort of ‘let’s try to answer these questions together’ exercise, youtuber I’m Autistic Now What does that in this video