Psychology Study: Myths and Stereotypes of Asperger Syndrome

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Hi

My friend and I are conducting a study to investigate the myths and stereotypes surrounding Asperger syndrome for our 3rd year project at the University of Reading. We would like to find out what stereotypes you encounter from the general population in your daily lives, both true and false.

We would be very grateful if you could help us: with your suggestions we will createa questionnaire to ask whether participantsbelieve the stereotypes. By asking you we can make the questionnaire as valid as possible. This will help us to understand people's perceptions of Asperger Syndrome more fully, and possibly help to educate those who are misinformed.

If you would like to help, post your answers on here, or email us ([email protected]) we would be really appreciative.

Many thanks

Becky and Vickii

Becky,
We have a search function (it uses Google search but it's functional), and I think you could actually get your answers from the topics we've talked about already without actually needing to interview people at all. You might get more candid stuff that way, anyhow, because people who are just discussing things among themselves tend to censor themselves less than people who are aware they're being interviewed.

Remember to cite Wrong Planet and PM people whose quotes you want to use.

I'll third the advice above. Actually, it might make for a more interesting study -- you not only get to see what kinds of stereotypes exist, but also which stereotypes actually bother the posters as well as what stereotypes exist within the community itself. Then later you can contact a more local organization to perform face-to-face interviews and compare the responses. It may take a while to get permission to do this, but it will be worth the effort and you will have more control over the composition of your respondent group, which you need if you want this to stand up to scrutiny -- unless, of course, you are interested in specifically studying members of WP without regard to diagnosis or lack thereof, which is also perfectly valid but very different from your original research question.

I'd recommend against using WP as a source in an AS/Autism study. The problem is that this site attracts all kinds of people:

- Trolls that just want to "troll-on", flame or bully other people and will mess up things - because they can.
- People with similar diagnoses that THINK they have AS, but they really have something else like Antisocial Personality Disorder or Bi-polar disorder. I suspect that there are one or two here which really isn't supposed to be on WP given their answers.
- People who are self diagnosed, which is fine, but given the above point, and that some people want to "belong" in a diagnosis because it is popular, it introduces a world of false positives into your study.

My advice is to find people who have been diagnosed with Autism/Aspergers from a professional institution, and by that i mean a skilled organisation that has experts in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Sure there are misdiagnoses, but for the purity of the science, it is my recommendation.

I would be interested to know if Becky and Vickii have been given ethical clearence for their project.

Also who is your supervisor at Reading, please be so good as to post the name of your department and supervisor in case anyone here wishes to contact your supervisor. At the wrong planet many of us tolerate researchers as long as they treat the community with respect, in the past some researchers have done some horrible things against the autistic community.

If you want to find out about some of their vile deeds then PM me and I will tell you some of the tales of poor / unethical research.

Also have you contacted Alex or the mods to ask for their blessing for your study ?

_________________
Health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity I am not a jigsaw, I am a free man !

Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

Hi All

We of course contacted Alex before using this site for our own study, and liaised with our project supervisior before going ahead.

Becky and Vickii

It's a myth to be able to talk about Asperger only from the point-of-view of psychology/psychiatry and omitting the known idea of neurology. Asperger is part of the human brain/mind for persons with it.

http://www.sfn.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron
http://www.associatedconditionsofcerebralpalsy.com/
http://www.ericdigests.org/2003-5/auditory.htm
http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED482344.pdf
http://www.asha.org/
http://www.hbo.com/movies/temple-grandin/index.html
http://www.neurologychannel.com/

Some persons have described the difference between Neurology and Psychiatry as follows:

The moon is made of rocks. - Neurology

The moon is made of cheese. - Psychiatry

I think there might be a bit of confusion as to what we are actually studying (or trying to). We are actually going to be interviewing people without Asperger about the syndrome.

On this website, we are looking to discuss some of the stereotypes you guys personally encounter on a day to day basis. The reason we don't want to lift responses straight from other sites is because we want to discuss it with people here. Also, it would be more interesting to find out which stereotypes you a) come across the most b) which ones are the most untrue c) which ones offend you the most, so we can include this in our study.

Our research is definitely not trying to offend anyone with Asperger's by being unethical. We have to undergo an Ethics check and be approved by our supervisor, so we are doing everything we can.

Vickii and Becky

I think I'm not communicating well here! I was talking about searching this site, not the Internet in general. I've seen at least a couple dozen threads on stereotypes with us talking about AS stereotypes; and you can check a person's profile for information on whether or not they're diagnosed AS, autism, something else, or NT. Most of us here are autsitics, some are families of autistics; others have closely related disorders like ADHD, or subclinical autistic traits. So yeah, if you went and searched this site, you'd pull up a lot of the old discussions (and the recent ones, too), that would show you stereotypes. If you like, you can also go to my blog; I've got the posts there tagged and I think there's a tag for either "stereotypes" or "prejudice" (or both? Hmm, anyway, there's a tag). Some other people here are autism bloggers, too. Generally we put links in signatures. You should also check the Autism Hub (google it), which is a blogroll with a lot of blogs by autistics, families of autistics, and a few researchers. They talk about stereotypes a lot too.

Thanks, I think we understand what you mean now!

We actually got the idea for our study when we stumbled across this site about 6 months ago. If we check out these AS stereotype threads again, we could collate all the information indeed. Obviously, we are looking for people's permission to use their responses, hence the new thread though. But thanks!

I've noticed that there seems to be a lot of generalizations about autistics among both the autistic and NT populations. People forget that there are all kinds of degrees, and that being diagnosed autistic doesn't require being checked off for every single symptom on the list.
When I told one of my friends that I was officially diagnosed with Asperger's she didn't believe it because I'm not antisocial. Also, I told another friend that I was "learning delayed" without specifically stating my disability. He said that he didn't think I was "learning delayed" because I can learn well, even though I learn slower than most people. He compared me to his "learning delayed" friend that can't learn, and has had a rough time maintaining jobs.
At an Asperger's group that I went to, many of the people didn't believe I have Asperger's because I can maintain good eye contact and have smooth flowing conversations.
And occasionally, but not often, there are still people that either think of autism as synonymous with retardation, or are only aware of the form of autism associated with sevantism
Even though anything's possible, I still think that people need to remember the slogan: "If you've seen one person with Asperger's, you've seen just one person."
Btw, if you quote me, please keep my name anonymous.

I have a stereotype: Employers around where I come from seem reluctant to take on Aspies (or even bother tiving them an interview) because they just assume that the Aspie is going to be completely useless in everything, just because they have a few social difficulties.