This goes hand-in-hand with the questions where I’m like, “Well, I did that a lot as a child, but I don’t do it anymore now.” It’d be nice if the tests provided clarification at the top to indicate if we’re supposed to respond “yes” to things that we used to do. Considering that childhood behaviors give more clues than adult ones, it makes sense to answer from the past. But at the same time, the test is using the present tense, so to be technically correct I should answer with what I do today. Right? Maybe they should say, “Do you, or have you ever, done blah blah blah?” The fact that this stuff isn’t spelled out goes to show that neurotypicals designed these things.
I imagine that having a big ol’, multi-paragraph explanation of these sorts of details might end up skipped by NTs, which maybe plays part in why these tests don’t bother with that - designers are seeing it from the NT angle. However, I don’t imagine such a text would scare off autistic people - more information to help us navigate an important, novel task? Yes, please! I will read that wall of text as if my life depended on it, because the ambiguous questions leave me stuck far longer than they probably should and any additional clarification would be welcome.
At the very least, maybe the laziest way (from the designers’ standpoint) to resolve this, would be to include optional “additional information” boxes so we can relieve these anxieties by explaining the conditional nature of some of our answers. Yeah, a simple scale is easier for documentation and diagnosis, but that sort of simplicity doesn’t track with how brains (and many things) actually work. Humans are complicated. Neurodiversity is complicated. Anything related to mental health at all is complicated. Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for the simplest route to understanding each others’ brains, but the route that more accurately conveys our brains’ nuanced topography.
One of the tests I did for my assessment did actually have multiple options like that! “Only when I was a child” “only as an adult” “as a child and an adult”, not exact wording but the answers were to to that effect!
This goes hand-in-hand with the questions where I’m like, “Well, I did that a lot as a child, but I don’t do it anymore now.” It’d be nice if the tests provided clarification at the top to indicate if we’re supposed to respond “yes” to things that we used to do. Considering that childhood behaviors give more clues than adult ones, it makes sense to answer from the past. But at the same time, the test is using the present tense, so to be technically correct I should answer with what I do today. Right? Maybe they should say, “Do you, or have you ever, done blah blah blah?” The fact that this stuff isn’t spelled out goes to show that neurotypicals designed these things.
I imagine that having a big ol’, multi-paragraph explanation of these sorts of details might end up skipped by NTs, which maybe plays part in why these tests don’t bother with that - designers are seeing it from the NT angle. However, I don’t imagine such a text would scare off autistic people - more information to help us navigate an important, novel task? Yes, please! I will read that wall of text as if my life depended on it, because the ambiguous questions leave me stuck far longer than they probably should and any additional clarification would be welcome.
At the very least, maybe the laziest way (from the designers’ standpoint) to resolve this, would be to include optional “additional information” boxes so we can relieve these anxieties by explaining the conditional nature of some of our answers. Yeah, a simple scale is easier for documentation and diagnosis, but that sort of simplicity doesn’t track with how brains (and many things) actually work. Humans are complicated. Neurodiversity is complicated. Anything related to mental health at all is complicated. Perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for the simplest route to understanding each others’ brains, but the route that more accurately conveys our brains’ nuanced topography.
I am fascinated to try to imagine what an autism test developed by an autistic autism researcher would be like. I suspect it would be a wild ride.
“Would you like spend the next eight hours discussing my extensive collection of model trains?”
“If you were to hand write a complete description of the texture of your least favorite food, how many pages of paper would be required?”
One of the tests I did for my assessment did actually have multiple options like that! “Only when I was a child” “only as an adult” “as a child and an adult”, not exact wording but the answers were to to that effect!