What is a typical ASD grownup

Post Reply New Topic

Is it possible to say something about what a typical ASD person are like?

How 50% percentile, 80-90% percentile are with respect to social skills, sameness, social functioning, voice etc?

What about outside the ASD group. If ASD is 1% of the population, what are the 2% percentile of the population like?

I am mostly thinking of intelligent/Asparger/functional/nearly functional.

I think the best definition of ASD in this context is somebody that would have been diagnosed as a child.

For someone to have been diagnosed as a child (small child), they couldn't really be over 21 right now. 2011-1994=17

I think that's why there isn't a lot of research about this out yet.

I got diagnosed at 8 and I'm 21 now.

It's complicated to say about a typical grown-up with ASD. I'm not sure if I am typical for an Aspie of my age or not. I'm typical in some ways, but there are also a lot of traits I don't have.

I'll let you know in 10 years.

A guy who works construction all day goes home and starts to figure out out how to deconstruct the dominant theories in a variety of interrelated disciplines concering his behavior and daily experience. Gets taken down the pub by his kids to "socialise". ( Growl and grumble )

This.

Well... I've met enough ASD people that I can probably take a stab at the percentiles.

Remember that mild autism is much more common than severe autism and that it's quite possible for someone to be in the 1st percentile in one thing, the 99th in another, etc.

For the diagnosable autism spectrum:

Employment:
95th percentile: Successful; may be highly paid; highly competent; respected in their profession.
75th percentile: Steady job in their area of interest.
50th percentile: Repeated tries to get employed; eventually found a job that they could keep. Generally has some problems with co-workers, but is a good, hard-working employee. By middle age will have a steady job, though perhaps not an ideal one.
25th percentile: Repeated short-term employment. May be working in supported employment, or may be on disability. May be doing volunteer work or part-time work or be employed by family.
5th percentile: Unemployed and unemployable. On disability; cannot work in supported employment. Probably does chores around the house and/or helps take care of self.

Family (Does not apply to those who don't want to marry):
95th percentile: Good marriage, strong family connections. If a homemaker, is capable and competent.
75th percentile: Married; some marital problems, but none unmanageable. Will probably be a good, though fallible, parent. Will probably need to have "time alone" away from family but can arrange it without problems.
50th percentile: Has probably been married, or is married, but with problems. May have poor communication with spouse. May have fallen into an abusive relationship. Requires "alone time".
25th percentile: Has had romantic relationships; may have had a child, and will probably need help from family to raise the child. May be overloaded by presence of family and need to live alone even if married.
5th percentile: Wants romance, but does not have the skills required to find a partner.

Self-care:
95th percentile: Lives independently; takes care of all own affairs.
75th percentile: Lives independently; does all own basic self-care; may need help with unusually difficult things like buying a new home, but can find help independently.
50th percentile: Lives independently; does all own basic self-care; needs occasional help with things like doing taxes, finding a new doctor, moving, etc.
25th percentile: Does all own basic self-care; lives with family or roommates. May not be able to drive. Needs occasional help with things like shopping, paying bills, cleaning the house.
5th percentile: Probably does basic self-care, but with help. Unable to drive; likely needs companion or service animal when outside the home independently. Lives with family or in assisted living facility/group home, or employs an aide.

Education (Assuming it is desired):
95th percentile: Doctoral degree or master's degree; law school, medical school; may be a professional researcher, professor, engineer. Probably making new contributions to his field.
75th percentile: Master's degree, multiple bachelors degrees, or may be an autodidact with post-graduate level knowledge in areas of interest.
50th percentile: College graduate or associate's degree; average grades. May have learning disabilities. Probably still quite motivated toward academics in areas of interest.
25th percentile: High school graduate or GED; probably needed special education and/or an aide in school. May go to trade school or go for a professional certificate. Probably has learning disabilities.
5th percentile: Special education diploma; probably required special classroom. Areas of talent are likely to be non-educational (art, music, etc.). Unlikely to achieve high-school-level education.

Friendships & Social Skills:
95th percentile: Extroverts will have many friends; introverts, a few close friends they depend on. Social skills are mostly automatized, though likely still needs to relax after a day spent with others.
75th percentile: Some friends; many acquaintances. Can effectively communicate with NTs and is not thought of as threatening, though may be perceived as eccentric or quirky. Proficient in social skills, but only with a good amount of effort. Will likely be exhausted after a few hours of socializing.
50th percentile: A few close friends; extroverts will also have many acquaintances. Probably thought of as odd by most people. Can communicate with NTs but occasionally misreads messages or sends the wrong message. Will likely be able to sustain socialization for an hour or two at a time.
25th percentile: One or two friends. Most people think of him as odd or eccentric and a few people perceive him as unpredictable or threatening. Can communicate with NTs, but often miscommunicates. May not be able to deal with misread communication; may be unaware of miscommunication when it occurs. May have problems with things like using the phone, talking to a grocery store clerk. May not be able to approach strangers.
5th percentile: May have no friends, or may have one or two close friends who have learned to communicate with him effectively. May not be able to communicate what is desired at will, and probably cannot read body language or facial expression. His oddity is obvious to strangers, and he is likely to be unable to initiate social interaction at will. Body language may be misread by police as "drunk" or "aggressive".

Meltdowns:
95th percentile: Meltdowns are absent except during extreme stress (loss of a loved one, major disaster, etc.) because this person has learned to predict and prevent them.
75th percentile: Meltdowns and shutdowns may occur, but can predict them and go to a private place; most of the time, able to prevent meltdowns.
50th percentile: Meltdowns/shutdowns are common, but do not endanger anyone. Able to predict/prevent them to a good extent and only rarely has a meltdown/shutdown in public.
25th percentile: Can control meltdowns/shutdowns somewhat, but often ends up embarrassing himself in public anyway. Meltdowns/shutdowns may be unpredictable. May need to wear MedicAlert for instances where speech is shut down or he is unable to calm himself. Assistance animal or companion may be useful.
5th percentile: Needs to have someone with him in case of meltdowns. May hit anyone within range, destroy objects, etc. Has little ability to prevent meltdowns and is unaware of most triggers and stressors. May be using or considering taking major tranquilizers (Risperdal, etc.) to try to deal with meltdowns.

Executive Functioning:
95th percentile: Has some minor problems with concentration, planning, but has developed systems that work for them so that they are able to cope as well as the average NT or even better.
75th percentile: Has problems with concentration/planning and transitions, and has compensatory systems that work most of the time. May be thrown off by new schedules or unexpected events.
50th percentile: Has problems with concentration, planning, transitions, unexpected events, task-switching, time management, etc. Probably diagnosed with ADHD as well as autism. Compensating somewhat by the use of lists/planners/reminders but still tends to lose track of time. May be quite overwhelmed after a transition like a move or a new job and have a much higher stress level.
25th percentile: Has severe problems with executive functioning, but not so severe that they threaten basic self-care ability. Probably has difficulty keeping house clean; may have a lot of clutter or be a pack rat, or may need everything to be in the exact same place at all times. Probably has unpredictable sleeping and eating patterns; or may hold so strictly to a schedule that he is unable to cope with things that throw off the schedule. Likely to have transition-triggered meltdowns/shutdowns. Compensatory strategies are somewhat helpful but do not allow complete independence.
5th percentile: Executive functioning difficulty affects self-care. May forget to eat or clean self; may have problems like not being able to put on a shirt if it is hung backward in the closet. Changes in routine ruin their whole day. May need someone to prompt them through multi-step tasks.

Speech/Language:
95th percentile: Able to speak whenever they desire. Has learned casual speech; has learned to use tone of voice. Able to change vocabulary and style to suit the audience they are speaking to.
75th percentile: Speech may be formal or have odd cadence, but is understandable by NTs. Can use tone of voice, etc., if concentrating in a quiet environment.
50th percentile: Speech is formal, robotic, and definitely odd, but still communicative and original. May occasionally lose access to speech during extreme stress. May supplement speech with writing, sign, or other non-speech symbolic language.
25th percentile: Speech is available most of the time, but occasionally lapses into scripts and functional echolalia; OR may use a communication device, sign language, or other non-speech symbolic communication. Able to express own ideas most of the time. May have problems with figurative language.
5th percentile: Speech consists mostly of communicative or non-communicative echolalia, scripts, non-grammatical sentences or single words. Probably supplements speech with PECS, simplified sign, gesture. Often frustrated by inability to communicate when desired. May be completely non-verbal but has probably learned some form of communication to compensate.

Sensory:
95th percentile: Has few sensory issues, and has learned to deal effectively with those they have.
75th percentile: Has a few sensory issues which can be annoying/distracting but not extreme. May require some minor accommodations (incandescent lighting, cotton clothing, etc.)
50th percentile: Sensory issues are definite and cause problems, some of which are difficult to solve. Probably has issues with things like TV monitors, seams in clothing, texture of food. Takes active steps to adjust the sensory environment to reduce stress level, but is not always successful. May be unusually vulnerable to injury because of undersensitivity.
25th percentile: Sensory issues are a major source of stress, and careful planning is required to manage them. May have a restricted diet. Probably has delayed processing of sensory information; probably qualifies for auditory processing disorder and other sensory processing disorders. If undersensitive, may have had one or more significant injuries due to being unaware of or unable to process pain; or may be undersensitive to heat/cold to the point of wearing T-shirts in freezing weather.
5th percentile: Sensory issues likely cause multiple meltdowns/shutdowns per week. Restricted diet is likely. Sensory processing is likely to be conscious and difficult, especially under stress; raw sensory data is not necessarily given meaning by the brain unless effort is made. May be unable to detect serious medical problems or injuries. May be unable to detect heat/cold. May be unable to detect source of sensory discomfort/stress.

There's my best guess. As you can see the major idea is that the spectrum is very variable.

As to the initial question:



No it isn't possible.

But as to the rest of your post in reference to percentiles, that isn't really relevant to the question, because those percentiles don't have anything to do with what the "average Autistic is like."

To understand what those perentiles mean, you need to first understand where they get them, and how they get them.

First, over a number of years, a lot of evaluations are completed. Out of all those questionnaires, some are diagnosed with Autism. Those are all dumped into a database. The database then returns what are called "typical" responses from Autistics. Because they keep adding to the database, what constitutes a "typical" response, changes over time.

For each question on a questionnaire, all the responses are calculated until they get a result that looks something like this:

Question 1) 0: 30%, 1: 15%, 2:20% 3:35%

So for question 1, 30% of Autistics chose option 0, and 35% chose option 3.

If that were the only question on the entire evaluation, and you chose option 1, you would be in the 15th percentile.

Of course there are many questions on the evaluation so they take the percentile you matched for each one, then average all the percentiles, and that's your percentile.

All that percentile means is that, well let's take an example...

Say you fall in the 65th percentile. What that means is that you answered the same as 65% of all the Autistics that have taken the same evaluation.

So what they are really doing is comparing your average answer to average answers of diagnosed Autistics. The higher your percentile, the higher the likelihood that you are also Autistic.

That is all that is meant by that percentile. It's not about whether or not you are an "average Autistic," it's about how similarly you answered the questions to how Autistics answered them.

Hope that helps.

Edit: Percentiles don't have anything to do with measuring skill sets. I think the OP is a bit confused as to what a "percentile" actually is.



Percentages and percentiles are not the same thing. Percentages are somewhat absolute (as absolute as anything statistical can be). For example, 1% of a population of 300 million is exactly 3 million.

I one percentile isn't an exact number. It's a percentage of an unknown number, or a number that can change over time. Percentiles are generally used as "comparative" numbers.

For example, lets say we're looking at 100 Dalmatians, and we wonder what percentage of them has exactly 100 spots. 60 have more than 100, so 40% have exactly 100. That's a percentage.

Now let's say we want to know how "average" that number is. So we add up all the spots on all the dogs, and come up with 41 thousand spots. 41 thousand divided by 100 is 410, so you would think the average Dalmatian (out of these 100 dogs only), has 410 spots. And that is, kind of, correct (it's the Mean average), but if forty of them have only 100, that means there some dogs there with a LOT more than 100, or even 410.

Let's break it down even further. Suppose we record how many spots EACH dog has.

41,000 spots total.

We already know 40 of them have 100 spots exactly, so I'll give you the count all of them:


40 have 100 spots
10 have 800 spots
20 have 1000 spots
30 have 300

41,000 spots.

Clearly if you just look at the numbers it's pretty easy to see that 100 spots is not average. But how close to average is it? You could just say, "We already figured out the average is 410, so they are 310 away from being average. The problem is, that isn't very valuable information unless you have all the numbers.

What if you don't have all the numbers?

What if you have no idea exactly how many dogs were counted, or how many total spots there are?

Also, compare what we want to know about whether someone is Autistic or not, to what we should want to know about these dogs. The question isn't about averages at all. It's about what's "typical." Or, how likely are we going to encounter a dog with one hundred spots exactly?

Well, regardless of how many spots there are total, the answer is pretty simple. You've got forty chances in 100 of picking a dog with exactly 100 spots. Those dogs are in the fortieth percentile of all the 100 dogs.

If we counted the spots on 200 more dogs, and none of them had exactly 100 spots, now they are in the 20th percentile.

It's a little more complicated when it's applied to Autism, because they are not only comparing your responses to Autism, but they DO usually give the NT percentile as well.

So you might score 10th percentile for Autism, but 80th percentile for NT. Far more likely you don't have Autism, because so may responses matched responses from people who don't have it.

But it doesn't say anything at all about how "average" an Autistic you are. There is no such scale.

Callisa, I consistently fall between you 5 and 25%tiles.

I'm more moderate, with more scatter, anywhere from 25 to 75. Friends technically 5, but... meh. Anyway, I haven't reached my potential yet; I can learn more (as, I assume, can you). The percentiles I'm thinking of are more like, "What you achieve by middle adulthood," rather than what you're doing in your twenties.

However... Remember that measured along any given autistic trait, the population of mild autism is much larger than the population of people with severe autism. Like so:



You can see that if you were to administer a theoretical test on a particular skill (any skill, doesn't matter; pick one) to the autistic population, you'd get scores that looked a lot like the graph above: Many more people would score high than low. (It's the same way in classrooms. In a typical classroom, you might get ten A's, ten B's, five C's, three D's and an F.) The test scores would be crowded at the higher end. So, someone who was at the 25th percentile (that is, scored better than 25% of the population) would actually have succeeded on half the test. Similarly, there's a lot of space between 1% and 5%--as much space as there is between 50% and 95%.

So you can be below the 50th percentile and still be pretty good at something, because of how the scores crowd up.

(I'm using the normal distribution here, cumulative probability. Statistics geeks will know what I mean.)

IDK if this is relevant or not, but I`m 22 and have the mentality of a 5-12 year old sometimes! Sometimes I`m more 5 and sometimes I`m more 12

These observations are interesting. Thank you for posting them.

I have a lot of 25s... Social's a bit higher but a lot lower than it was 15 years ago, and speech around 50 but can drop to 25 at times. A few these seem to drop to 5 on occasion (especially under stress).

What counts as middle adulthood? I'm 42 next month.

Last edited by Verdandi on 21 Jul 2011, 9:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes: "When you've seen one Aspie, you've seen one Aspie."

I don't know much about these 'percentiles' you mention, but I can say this: While my social skills may make me seem 'weird' or 'eccentric', my technical and engineering skills put me in demand for consultation all up and down the west coast. Maybe I don't quite fit in socially, but when it comes to process-control systems, I am the "Go-To" guy for my corporation.

My official diagnosis was only in the last year or so, and I am in my mid-fifties. Once the psychologist informed me, my experiences suddenly made sense, especially my "outside-looking-in" social perspective.

I may be one of the lucky ones, in that I made the decision in my teens to not be a victim the rest of my life, and that included being a victim of my own ignorance. University was a struggle, but because I had little or no social life at the time, studying was all that I had left to do.

For me, success came down to determination and diligence.

Does this help your understanding?

Callista, that was fascinating. Where did those stats come from?

On most of those categories, I repeatedly found myself in the 50-75% bracket, although one of them much lower.
It is also interesting for me to think about other autistic people I've been around in this way, for a more measurable sense of comparison.

As to the OP... I am 29, and not diagnosed until this year. My development and lifestyle would likely be considered odd, yet moderately functional. I have a steady job, although it took a long time to find, and was difficult to hold down for a while. I've been in relationships, although none of them lasted much longer than couple of months. I can pay my bills and drive and all that, but have issues with organization and time management. Really, I'm something in the neighborhood of 65% functional. That's about how I feel most days.

Callista, hi, I don't suppose you have managed to correlate the following variables to produce
The following data

Take the baseline of the five catgories of behavior used to define autistic traits:

Soo-Jeong Kim1*, Raquel M Silva1, Cindi G Flores1, Suma Jacob2, Stephen Guter2, Gregory Valcante1, Annette M Zaytoun1, Edwin H Cook2 and Judith A Badner3

http://www.molecularautism.com/content/2/1/8

RRB assessment

Quote:
We used the RBS-R as our primary RRB measure. The RBS-R is an empirically derived, standardized and psychometrically sound rating scale, targeting a variety of abnormal repetitive behaviors [26,27]. The RBS-R includes forty-three individual items grouped into six empirically derived subscales: stereotyped behavior, self-injurious behavior, compulsive behavior, ritualistic behavior, sameness behavior, restricted behavior, and a sum score. A recent factor analysis by Lam and Aman (2007) produced a five-factor solution; stereotyped behavior, self-injurious behavior, compulsive behavior, ritualistic/sameness behavior and restricted interests [28]

And examine the distribution of these traits in various levels of "presentation" with regared to occupation type.

Are there any studies like this that have looked into this- ie two curves one degree of presentation ( non-judgemental term severity of impairment) set against numbers of persons employed with varying degrees of presentaion in various occupations.


Looking for correlation between :

a) distriubution and numbers employed

a1) types of employment

b) employment ratio to degree of presentaion of traits.

Thanks

Meme

That's just the normal distribution (Bell curve). I have no reason to think it doesn't apply to autism like it applies to practically everything else you can measure, and there's nothing in the studies I've read to imply that autistic traits don't follow the normal distribution.

To be most correct, there should probably be a small bump around the 1st-2nd percentile to account for the cases of autism which are associated with severe congenital disorders (Rett's, for example). There's a similar bump in the IQ normal distribution that comes from the congenital disorders that cause severe to profound cognitive disability; so Rett's and probably Heller syndrome (CDD), and probably a few others we don't know about yet would show up as a little increase in population in the lower end of skill graphs, because both of those tend to cause very extreme, obvious autism much more often than the autism that's not associated with congenital disorders. Maybe not on all skill graphs, though. Some skills, like the visual-spatial ones, you actually end up with the highly-verbal, less-autistic-looking people being on the lower end.