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.pdfwhich 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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4 Responses to “A bigger quotient”
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Saja on August 4th, 2009 Saja(Quote)
I’ve taken it a few times over the past five years, and like you, I can see immediately for some of the questions what the Aspie answer is. Also like you, I try to answer the questions honestly regardless. I always get a 37 or a 38.
Anna on August 4th, 2009 Anna(Quote)
I thought it might be interesting for test-takers to look at the score breakdown into the five categories, to see if more of the points came from certain categories, or if they were evenly spread.
http://glennrowe.net/BaronCohen/MaleFemale.asp
Anna on August 4th, 2009 Anna(Quote)
BTW for the EQ and SQ tests which I linked to in my previous post, it does matter whether you put definitely or slightly.
James on August 4th, 2009 James(Quote)
Hi Anna,
Thanks for providing the links.
Yes – it would be interesting to break the results down by category to see where the scores lie. Will see if I can find the time to do just that.
James