A bigger quotient

I received an email via the contact page of the website yesterday from Anna. I thought it might be of use to many of you, so here’s what she said:

Hi James,

I’m sure you must have done the AQ test, but I recently saw this PDF
http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/docs/papers/2001_BCetal_AQ.pdf

which shows on page 5 how the 50 different questions break down into five categories – social skill, attention switching, attention to detail, communication and imagination.

Page 9 shows whether a yes or a no for each question gets you a point.

The test is on page 18-21.

It doesn’t matter whether you say definitely or slightly, so I just wrote numbers 1-50 on a bit of paper, and went through the questions writing y or n. Then you can mark it with the key from page 9, and use the details from page 5 to get the category breakdowns.

Then you can look at page 23 to see how your results compare to the AS/HFA and control groups. Page 31 has a graph plotting results for controls/HFA for just the final AQ score.

Anna is right – I took the AQ test last autumn, when I was first starting to suspect I may have AS.

I still have the piece of paper with my results on it from that day, back in September last year. I scored 30. Not a huge score, but it was far enough from the norm to add weight to my suspicions.

Armed with the above link from Anna, I thought I’d try the test again today. With nearly a year’s worth of AS knowledge and considerably better self understanding, I wondered what my result would be this time around.

I scored 43.

Interesting. On some questions I instantly knew what the expected Aspie answer was, and on others I didn’t – which I guess goes to show that I still don’t know everything about my condition even after all this time. I really tried to be honest, and I can genuinely say that many of my results have changed through a better understanding of myself, and appreciating that I don’t behave quite as normally as I thought I did a year ago.

Having said all that I’m sure my self-knowledge will have skewed my results a little in the direction of AS. There were a few questions that were clearly borderline for me, and in each case I plumped for the pro-AS response on these. Had I chosen to score these the other way I would still have got a score of around 40.

Am I any more autistic than I was a year ago? No – I’m just much more aware of how autism touches my life, and more honest about acknowledging it.

Have any of you taken the AQ for a second time? If so, did you also find that your increased self knowledge over time had changed the score?

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