Questionnaires

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Does anyone else have difficulty answering questionnaires that want to know how much or how often something applies to you? Quite often there'll be questions I can't give answer to, due to lack of personal experience. Even if I can answer I struggle to decide which answer to circle or tick.

Yes. In my case.

Especially if it's knowingly very conditional.
And what if those conditions causes happens too often? Is that really "me"?



Like; Yes I have crappier sleep.

Why??
Because X and Y, or Y and not enough Z, because A and B happens without C, etc...

Instead they'll assume if I said that meaning I have a typical case of insomnia or a secondary one because "I have a lot in mind" or "it's just anxiety"

Not knowing I have several disruptors that isn't even in my damn head.


Why not ask me;
Do I hate sleep? I'll wholeheartedly say Yes.

Then a follow up;
Do you dream often? Somehow Yes.
Do you often have nightmares? I'll straight up say No.

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Yes!! How the hell am I supposed to know if I do something more or less than others? I didn't even know I was autistic. I need questions with objective answers that use standard units. Otherwise, my responses are going vary wildly from week to week.

they're not good, funny how all the §§§§ funneled into autism hasn't even delivered one other sort of questionaire

i can't talk in definitives, there's always two sides to everything

most often there's even a mix of two questions in one question, and one wonders which one has the priority ?

hahaha, I need detailed explanations for "what do you mean by that" as many questions seem to me to be general and not specific enough to answer correctly. I'm glad to see I'm not alone.

Yes I often have problems with them. They tend to be way too reductionist, not enough granularity in the allowed choices, and I'm not the only one to criticise that forced-response thing they love so much, where there's no "don't know".option. I can see why they do it - to save time and money - but these quick-and-dirty screening tests obviously have the downside of being dirty as well as the upside of being quick. Yet in practice, if you score negative then you may well be denied a proper assessment, if the screening test is about a serious health issue that you rather need to be looked into properly. So the logical way through would be to fiddle the screening test and ensure it's positive so that you qualify for a proper assessment.

With the AQ test for example, I feel I can get any result I want without actually lying. I always want to write an essay for each question but they force me to just say yes or no. Thing is, for me the right answer is nearly always "it depends on......." And I sometimes notice that the literally correct answer is bound to be misleading, e.g. "do people often tell you that you......" - well I spend very little time with people who would be so rude as to criticise me that brashly, so the literally correct answer is "no" but I often think that the only way to avoid misleading the result is to answer "yes." And if you look into the way they score the AQ test, all those "agree somewhat" / "disagree somewhat" options are actually counted as "agree completely" / "disagree completely," which makes me feel that the designer takes me for a fool. The test pretends to have a degree of granularity that it doesn't actually have.

Yes, I've always had trouble with these kinds of things. I end up overthinking them and I'd answer differently different times I take them. Many questions are too vague. I get stuck on thinking stuff like that "Okay, well that could apply to me a lot, but only in these specific circumstances, so does it even count?". I also am always trying too hard to read what the purpose of the question is, which if I can infer it then that will help me answer appropriately, but that also comes off as me gaming the questionnaire.

I wish I could turn off this overthinking sometimes...

^
Overthinking........yes, me too, though I'm still not convinced that it's not the rest of the world that underthinks.

To get an AQ test result that I could have anything like the required degree of faith in, I had to do the following:
Whenever a question came up that I wanted to answer "don't know," I was of course forced to give an answer that seemed biased positively or negatively. So I'd note down the direction of the bias, and then for the next "don't know" question I'd bias it the other way. That way, there was some chance that the bias would cancel itself out.

I'm a scientist you see, and I like to get things as nearly right as possible. I'm into thoroughness and perfectionism, like many Aspies are. You'd think that the designer of a test aimed at Aspies would have appreciated the likelihood of our overthinking tendencies, and would have taken that into account when creating the questions, but I guess it was all done by neurotypicals who just don't see things from our point of view, though they're considered by society to be experts in the subject.

The Aspie-Quiz is much more to my liking:

https://musingsofanaspie.com/2012/11/20 ... spie-quiz/

To my mind, it knocks Baron-Cohen's AQ test into a cocked hat. It allows neutral responses and some gradation rather than just yes or no. It doesn't try to cheat the subject with placebo boxes. It's very detailed and has a lot more questions. Sure, it takes longer, but the truth takes time. But the medical establishment doesn't recognise it, perhaps because it sees Baron Cohen as the glorious brand leader and doesn't want rivals muscling in on his patch.

Here's one guy's detailed take on the Aspie-quiz. It's long, but may be worth a look if you have the time:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AutismTranslat ... utism_and/

To my mind, maybe it's a little bit like being black and having nobody but white people discussing discrimination and racism. To understand ASD, you need input from the horse's mouth (Aspies) every bit as much as you need it from NTs.

I don't overthink.

Only that as long as I have those disruptions (in which I've been dealing for years now), I have little to no sense of continuity that usually lets people progress gradually and consistently.

Instead, I answer questionnaires on different varying times.
See myself how my answers changes throughout a week. See if there's a particular consistency.

I write journals everyday since new year.
Then when I look what I've written even few days ago, after a particular day or so, it felt like a lifetime instead.

As if it's a distant memory or that whoever I was while writing that was somewhat far away from whoever I was as currently reading in my present place.

Answering surveys about myself is more or less the same.
Even as something just for the heck of it as for fun personality tests; the introversion is the most consistent by a margin, everything else is a matter of when and why.

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Me & my girlfriend have a hard time answering depression screening type questions because the wording feels very wrong. They ask about how many days we have felt different ways & our moods do not always stay same throughout an entire day. I answer based on how I felt overall for that time frame like an answer of one or two days to me means a tiny bit of the time & a few days means to me some of the time.

I have a very hard time with online quizzes type tests where they ask about how others would describe me or think about me because different people can have very contradictory opinions of me even if they've known me in the same environment at the same time.