Neurodiversity research using the Aspie Quiz

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In a separate thread here:

I noticed the following in the above article:


Hmmm, I see a potential problem here. It seems to me that the only way to get a (mostly) "neurotypical control group" is via a random sample of the general population -- which, of course, is not easy to obtain, except by methods requiring substantial research funding.

It seems to me that the only people likely to take something called the "Aspie Quiz," even from a link on a site unrelated to autism, would be people who have reason to suspect that they might be autistic. Hence it seems likely to me that your "neurotypical" sample would consist mostly of people who fit the "broad autistic phenotype" (BAP) rather than more typical NT's.

So, while you might have come up with an excellent instrument for differentiating people with ASD (or at least something very close to ASD) from the more NT-like BAP people, I would hesitate to use the results to make generalizations about typical NTs vs. all NDs.

For example:


In both of the above, you used Aspie Quiz results in conjunction with other tests to draw conclusions about NTs in general vs. NDs in general. I strongly question this on the grounds stated above.

There might be some traits that the more NT-like BAP people tend to have that are not shared by typical NTs or by most NDs. For example, I suspect that the more NT-like BAP people would be more likely than either typical NTs or people with ASD to have a successful academic career (assuming Hans Asperger was correct about a "dash of autism" being essential to success in the academic world), especially in STEM fields.

Conversely, there might conceivably be some traits that are shared both by many NT's and by many ND's but are relatively uncommon among the more NT-like BAP people. I don't know of such a trait offhand, but I would hazard a wild guess that a propensity for infatuation might be one such trait.

I'll post some other, more specific objections later.

The Aspie Quiz is at best a first step in determining if a person is autistic. To be used as the only tool to determine if a person is or is suspected to be neurodiverse is irresponsible.

For diagnostic purposes, you're right. A professional diagnosis certainly should not (and usually does not) rely solely on just one test.

However, in experimental psychology, it is common to use a test (more commonly Simon Baron-Cohen's AQ than the Aspie Quiz) rather than diagnoses, for statistical purposes.

My comments about the Aspie Quiz pertained primarily to its possible uses in experimental psychology, not its conceivable use as a diagnostic tool.

There should be more than just a person taking one test to determine if said person is neurodiverse no matter what the scientific context.

The quiz is no longer scored that way. It was scored like that in an intermediate phase before the two factors were discovered. So, to complain about participation and control groups is not relevant as those are not used anymore. Any test needs some initial items (which we collected in 2004), some method to validate them (this is often missed when they are supposed to be relevant for DSM diagnosis) and finally some objective method to select items & score the test. When the test was validated, I used an NT control group and diagnosed ASD (as well as self-diagnosed). This was necessary to construct the initial test with sound items. However, once the two-factor nature of the material became evident, scoring changed to use an item's factor loadings as a weight factor for scoring. With that in place, items that belonged to the factors (but was unknown in BAP and ASD) could be discovered and evaluated. The scoring remained consistent (as evidenced by factor congruence coefficients presented in the paper) despite using other items and new participants. As part of the item selection process, another criteria was to use "evenly distributed traits" in order to catch all of neurodiversity. Also, in the last version, Aspie Quiz group scores are calculated based on CFA (Confirmative Factor Analysis) loadings.

Also, if I indeed had a completely random sample, that would mean a majority would be NTs, something that would bias thing towards NTs. The typical, current sample instead has 1/3 NTs, 1/3 mixed and 1/3 NDs, something that is optimal for data analysis. Even if there are few pure NTs and NDs, that's not really that relevant for discovering traits. ASD and neurodiversity are spectrums of traits, and few people have all or none of them. For scientific research, it's the linkage between traits that is interesting, not the pure forms.



I'd encourage anybody that think they know more neurodiversity traits to present their ideas and I'll be happy to check if they relate to the NT or ND factor, or are unrelated to neurodiversity. That's the beauty of the construction process.



Without an objective neurodiversity definition, you are unable to do empirical research on any of these issues. The AQ test simply cannot be used for this, and neither can the BAPQ. They are all based on arbitrary traits that DSM committees have decided is part of a disorder.

Last edited by rdos on 16 Jul 2019, 6:14 am, edited 2 times in total.

Being neurodiverse and ASD are not the same thing. ASD has a fixed definition in the DSM that was decided by psychiatrists. You cannot change or extend this with anything without being part of the DSM committees that decides on diagnostic criteria. ASD also is a problem-oriented diagnosis and so any positive aspect like STEM advantages are not part of ASD. They only are correlated aspects.

In other words, based on statistical clusterings you've discovered, you've developed your own concepts of "neurodiverse" and "neurotypical" that are a bit different from the way everyone else uses those words.

In subsequent messages below, I will use the terms "RDOS-ND" and "RDOS-NT" to refer to your concepts, to distinguish them from the more common and older meanings of "ND" and "NT".

The term "neurotypical" was coined back in the 1990's by members of Autism Network International, according to this page by Jim Sinclair which is dated 1998. The term "neurodiversity" was coined by autistic sociologist Judy Singer in 1998.

Also, a point of English grammar, according to Neurodiversity: Some Basic Terms & Definitions by Nick Walker, September 27, 2014:

However, given your highly biased sample, if you don't also have a random sample of the general population and compare it to your sample, you have no way of knowing whether all the traits you've identified as "neurotypical" are in fact common in the general population and thus truly "neurotypical" in the commonly-accepted sense. All you know is that you've identified two statistical clusterings, which I will refer to as RDOS-ND and RDOS-NT, where RDOS-ND roughly corresponds to ASD and RDOS-NT roughly corresponds to "not ASD, but probably close enough to ASD to wonder about it enough to take a quiz called the Aspie Quiz."


Agreed.

We do not use the term “racially diverse” to mean non white but we do use “people of color”

I've seen other academic papers in which the population sample is categorized in terms of what is sometimes called "trait autism" or "narrow autistic phenotype" rather than ASD, where "trait autism" or "narrow autistic phenotype" is defined in terms of a person's score on one particular test (usually Simon Baron-Cohen's AQ).

The justification for this is simply to have some uniform, consistent, objective standard, whereas ASD diagnoses are still inherently at least somewhat subjective; they still can vary quite a bit depending on who diagnosed you.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 16 Jul 2019, 5:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I know about these claims from the neurodiversity community, but they build on false premises, and thus I will not use their terminology.

First, an individual cannot be neurotypical. Both neurotypical and neurodiverse operate on groups, not individuals. It makes no sense to only invent a term neurodivergent for use on individuals but no corresponding term for typical people. Therefore, I use neurodiverse and neurotypical when somebody has mostly one of these sets of traits, and use "mixed" when they have both sets.

Second, neurodiversity is not on a spectrum with neurotypical traits, and there are not multiple neurodiverse spectrums. Instead, empirical data shows that neurodiverse and neurotypical traits have their own distributions that are not continuous. Thus, it's invalid to talk about where on the neurodiverse-neurotypical scale somebody is. You need to give people separate neurodiverse and neurotypical scores. That's the consequence of the two-factor nature of human diversity.

You argue that I should use my own terms and not neurodiversity. I think this makes no sense. If somebody came up with a faulty hypothesis about how gravity operated, and I provided empirical data that showed the hypothesis was wrong, I wouldn't call gravity for something else because the people who originally coined the term didn't understand it. To me, it's very obvious that the people that formulated the "regulations" for how to use neurodiversity didn't understand how it operated and has built a framework based on faulty assumptions. After all, we are describing the same thing, and the neurodiversity community has not provided any usable definition of neurodiverse (or neurotypical), and so the whole concept is completely unusable for science. Also, they will never be able to formulate any scientifically useful definition based on the current terms given that they not supported by empirical data. Thus, there is no need to specify that my neurodiversity definition is special. It's the only one available that can be used for scientific research.

Besides, I've already had the term Aspie sabotaged by people that think ASD and Aspie are the same thing, and I'm certainly not gonna use yet another term because somebody defined it in a way it never was meant to be defined in. I could use Eurasian (neurodiverse) and African (neurotypical), but I don't think this will work at the current point. However, that is how the terms should be interpreted.

There are several forum threads where people are doing Aspie Quiz with the objective of coming out as typical. I'm sure these threads motivated people to do Aspie Quiz even if they didn't feel odd or unusual. It's also these threads (which I could cluster with referral information) have a rather low amount of NDs, and a very high amount of NTs. There have also been several occasions when a huge amount of people took Aspie Quiz during a few days after the link had been posted on a high-activity context. Several of these had over 80% of NTs, and in fact, somewhat sabotaged the factor analysis.

I also highly doubt that it is possible to get a random population in regards to neurodiversity / autistic traits regardless of how much money somebody had for such a project. For instance, if you use some type of students (like psychology students), then this will bias the population since the choice of education is very likely linked to
neurodiversity.

So, it's possible there is some "mystical" neurotypical population that I've completely missed, but I find that rather unlikely. I base that on the empirical finding that being neurotypical is not a "standard state", but a spectrum. Since neurotypical is a spectrum, I will get these traits just by having people with neurotypical traits in the dataset.

Similarly, as was explained in detail on the page I quoted in my previous message, the proper term for "non-neurotypical" is "neurodivergent," NOT "neurodiverse."

Actually, "neurodivergent" can be used of groups as well as individuals. A group of people is "neurodivergent" if if is composed only of non-neurotypical people. On the other hand, a group is "neurodiverse" if it is composed of people of multiple different neurotypes.

Since your thesis seems to be that all non-neurotypical people constitute just one other distinct neurotype, it makes no sense at all to refer to that one singular other neurotype as "neurodiverse." If there is "just one" anything, it cannot be "______diverse" (filling in the blank with whatever relevant prefix).


In other words, you are using the word "neurodiverse" to refer to just one set of traits which you are contrasting to a singular "neurotypical" set of traits. Again, "just one" anything is by definition not diverse, hence can't be "neurodiverse."


Again, two singular entities. A singular anything is by definition not "diverse."


Why can't you at least refer to your concept as "neurodivergence" instead of "neurodiversity"? Even the idea that all "neurodivergence" is essentially just one thing is controversial at best, but at least it wouldn't be utterly contrary to the very meaning of the component parts of the word "neurodivergence" itself.


Are you claiming to be the person who coined the term "Aspie"? If so, can you prove that?

Also, what is/was your definition of "Aspie"? The same thing as what you are now calling "neurodiverse," or something else?

EDIT: The term "Aspie" was coined by Liane Holliday Willey in 1999, in her book Pretending to be Normal, according to her page on SpringerLink. According to another page by her, the word "Aspie" is simply a shorthand for "person diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome."

No, there are TWO distinct neurotypes. One has a Eurasian origin and the other has an African origin. There is no sense in talking about non-neurotypical people, since neurotypical is just a neurotype, not some magic state of humanity.



I'm not concerned with language issues. Neurodiverse has become a widely known term for the larger autistic phenotype, and it doesn't matter what it originally was intended to refer to which is and was a false premise. Just like you won't change the name for "gravity" because you find some new background for it, there is no need to invent another unknown term for "neurodiversity" when there already is a widely known. Besides, Aspie Quiz has been a major source for spreading the terms neurodiverse and neurotypical, and so I see no reason why I should change anything.



That's just a language issue. Terms do change meaning as knowledge change, and sometimes they become strange because of it.



Because "neurodivergence" gives the wrong cues about what I measure.



Certainly, but people started to use Aspie in a much wider context than diagnosed AS, so the de-facto use of the term had changed. However, then some people started to refer to who invented it and what it should mean, and then some people (including myself) stopped used the term altogether since we didn't mean diagnosed AS. That's also why all scores and everything else in Aspie Quiz stopped using "Aspie" and started to use "neurodiverse" instead. I don't think this was fair given that it was Aspie Quiz that had made the term Aspie well-known, along with many undiagnosed people that used it for the personality-type on forums. I'm certainly not given up the "battle" about neurodiverse in a similar way. It's not the creators of the term that "owe" it and it's meaning, it's the people that use it that does. That's how language works & evolves.

There is also the issue about if you could subdivide neurodiverse & neurotypical traits into distinct subgroups, but this largely fails, and not just in Aspie Quiz. In fact, all traits used in Aspie Quiz (neurotypical & neurodiverse alike) are correlated to each other, and the correlation is larger when the traits have a strong correlation to the total score. This is why the only natural grouping of these traits is a two-factor model of two distinct neurotypes. It's possible to use Expolorative Factor Analysis (EFA) to find sub-groups, but the problem is that these sub-groups differ when only neurotypical and only neurodiverse participants are used (and of course, when the total dataset is used). Because of this, the groupings could only use EFA as a hint. When running Confirmative Factor Analysis (CFA), another problem arises. The results will differ based on which program is used. For instance, when using MPlus, results will depend on the size of the dataset in a really strange way that degrades results with larger datasets in a linear fashion. With STATA, the results won't depend on the size of the dataset, but the results are mediocre. Same with R, but the results differ from STATA. The whole process seems rather unstable and things like sample composition will matter. I think based on these failures, it's not possible to group these traits, and the reason is that they are part of two largely independent neurotypes.

Another thing to take into account is Chronbach Alpha (CA) and dependence of traits. Aspie Quiz has a very high CA (typically .95) but a low correlation between items. The AQ test has a mediocre CA (.8-.9), and a much higher correlation between items. The results in Aspie Quiz are highly atypical given that a high CA usually is connected to high correlations between items.