4:24am December 26, 2013

➸ The Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R)

clatterbane:

politeyeti:

clatterbane:

hibernatingsunflower:

goldenheartedrose:

logicalabsurdity:

So theojoiegrise posted a link to a test in the #actuallyautistic tag, and I happened to see it and, well, I’m r e a l l y not surprised at my results. Like, at all. I think I’ll have a heart attack and DIE of NOT SURPRISE!

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I finally took this and oh yeah, not surprised at all.

http://aspietests.org/raads/questions.php?show=9076da0b16142&locale=en_GB

I took it too and here are my results. I am not surprised.

Not that surprised, either.
http://aspietests.org/raads/questions.php?show=e744294916274&locale=en_GB

http://aspietests.org/raads/questions.php?show=dd6b771816490&locale=en_GB

Did we all notice that the scores for the “female” group (kinda pissed there wasn’t any third option) averaged higher than the “male” group? Because I did.

This test seems like a fairly good one, though I think it still plays a little heavily on the idea of autistic=super!introvert.

I noticed the same thing, on both counts. (And also wished that they’d at least had an “other” option there.)

Also that there was very little difference between the “diagnosed” and “suspected” groups. For those who insist that nobody could possibly know this without an official stamp of approval.

Indeed. Ettina did a thing with the tests posted on wrong planet to compare suspected and diagnosed scores.

Her conclusion:

Ideally, I would like to run a study in which a large sample of self-diagnosed autistics were assessed by a team of psychologists experienced in diagnosing adult high-functioning autistics. However, this study suggests that self-diagnosed autistics - at least those on the Wrong Planet forum - score about the same as officially diagnosed autistics on a wide variety of tests. Contrary to the stereotype that self-diagnosis of autism is inaccurate, this study suggests that it’s actually very accurate in the majority of cases. Undoubtedly some self-diagnosed autistics are not in fact on the autism spectrum, but so are some officially diagnosed autistics. And from what I can tell, the misdiagnosis rate is pretty similar between self-diagnosis and official diagnosis.

http://aspietests.org/raads/questions.php?show=dd0fc66216533&locale=en_GB

I didn’t like the way it assumed that anyone taking the test would have skills higher than a certain level in certain areas. So even though I have more language problems than most autistic people I know online, I scored fairly low in that section of the test (relative to other sections, I still scored very high overall in that section) because the only language problems it tested were ones like taking things literally. It didn’t test things like needing to work really hard to understand anything at all, having long periods where you can’t understand any language whatsoever, not being able to speak, or things like that.

But I still got a score of around 198 overall.

And the thing about language was true in other areas too. There are a lot of types of autism that wouldn’t be measured well by this test, or that even if the person scored high on the test, the biggest problems the person had would not be measured by the test at all. It talked about sensory sensitivity, but it didn’t talk about the inability to recognize anything around you or other more severe sensory issues.

I worry that people with certain very pure forms of specific kinds of autism would barely be picked up at all by this test.

Notes: