ASD Research Survey

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Dear WP Community,
We are researchers from Boston University studying religious beliefs and special interests within the ASD population. Previously, we posted on WP but did not understand the forum policies. Since then, we have emailed with Alex Plank about our study, and he has given us permission to post this message. We would appreciate the help from anyone in the WP community with our online survey. Our research survey uses several basic measures of personality, along with some tests developed by our research team. None of the questions are too personal, and we respect confidentiality rights. Anyone can take our survey: individuals on the spectrum, neurotypicals, and individuals who are unsure where they fit. Our reseach is exploratory and we do not have one limiting hypothesis. If you are interested in our study, please contact buautismstudy@gmail.com, or read our more thorough debriefing page at the end of our survey. Our research has been approved by the Boston University IRB, and it is supervised by Dr. Catherine Caldwell-Harris. (http://www.bu.edu/psych/faculty/charris/)

Thank you to anyone who would like to help. Here is the link to our survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=7 ... zrag_3d_3d

I have just done some checks, Dr. Catherine Caldwell-Harris does exist and she has published in the peer reviewed literature.

I can not comment on her morals or how good her research is becuase I know too little about her.

They survey asks a set of questions about your faith (or lack of faith), it asks you to look at eyes and work out what people are thinking and it tests you using some of SBC's research tools. I spotted some of the questions from the SQ test.

Just providing moderator validation; this study has been approved by Alex for solicitation of participants and making members aware of their programs here on WP. That approval should not be read as an blanket endorsement, but I feel comfortable with Alex's review and decision here, and hope that BU is able to gain some useful information.


M.

I find the study pretty interesting. First I thought why do they go on and on about professional diagnosis, when many people on WP are self-diagnosed, but then I saw the AQ-test, so I guess they will use it as well for classifications (at least I hope so). OTOH, the AQ-test is pretty narrow, and so is the SQ test and the eye-test, so I actually do not anticipate they will find much correlation with religious belief systems. This is because I already did this investigation in Aspie-quiz, which is a much broader test, and found that correlation with religous beliefs was small, and not much related to the traditional ASDs traits, especially not special interests or obsessions.

On the last page they speculate on the results:

Probably false because of the results from Aspie-quiz. The religous group in Aspie-quiz correlates best with paranoia, and to a lesser degree with Aspie communication and Aspie perception. OTOH, this survey focuses on traditional religion and not so much on supernatural beliefs and abilities, but Aspie-quiz found these to be related, so the result should be the same.



Possible. OTOH, I suspect the major player is ODD (rejecting authority) which is not uncommon among autistics.



This is probably true.

Source (Aspie-quiz evaluation): www.rdos.net/eng/aspeval

I thought it was a really interesting study, and I was REALLY impressed by how thorough their categories of special interests were. I honestly cannot think of a special interest class that wasn't mentioned. Even an obsession with a person was on there, something that I never thought would be asked. I also like how this wasn't just a survey. I've always wanted to participate in a research study by being interviewed at a testing center, and this study gave us the chance to do that in the second stage, if we wanted to.
-OddDuckNash99-

Great survey

Not new. It was several years ago that I asked this in Aspie-quiz:
http://www.rdos.net/eng/aspeval/#362