Are autistic personality tests reliable?

Post Reply New Topic

They may or may not be skewed towards rendering a positive result. If many of the online tests are verbatim copies of professional tests , then it may just be that a lay person answering such tests is going to say yes or no to a question when a clinician would answer the opposite about the person .

Tests like the RDOS which are not verbatim copies of clinical tests are undoubtedly more problematic . Then you have the myriad of 'Playbuzz' level tests .

the online tests are not meant to be diagnostic. They are just meant to give you an indication as to whether or not you should consider pursuing further and more accurate testing from an official source.

I actually hummed and hawed for several years after doing such tests before I was officially tested . The actual assessment ,especially the ADOS , raised points I hadn't considered . It was far more informative than any online test could be .

The standard AQ test with 50 questions was used in my assessment. The doctor read me the questions verbally. They were in a different order than the online version but exactly the same questions. I got 49/50 both online and in person. I still don't know which one is my "one" difference.

Is this the RDOS ?



I got 191/200 and 19/200.

I didn't notice the exact RDOS during my clinical assessment but many of its questions or topics were covered during my other assessment activities.

The gold standard of autism assessment has a mountain of research that shows it is is reliable. That standard is the combination of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, Second Edition (ADOS-2) and the The Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R).

Anything you can access online to test yourself for autism is not as reliable, kind of like a toy compared to the serous tradesman's tools that are the ADOS-2 and ADI-R which are only accessible to trained health care professionals, typically a psychologist. Any test accessible to the public including the AQ and Aspie Quiz are mostly designed to be "screeners" to identify the presence and pattern of autistic traits from someone's self report, so they are only as good as a persons self insight. They are useful as a first stage to identify someone as having autistic traits, but they were never designed to be used on their own to diagnose autism with reliability.

I think the same could be said for developmental and mental health tests in general . They are,I think, there to give you an idea as to whether to pursue things further with a health professional . In that sense they can serve a useful purpose .

That "Aspie Quiz" is very popular on this site.

The OP himself has his scores from that test on his window.

Definitely not a substitute for the real deal: the battery of tests given to you face to face by a professional.

As long as you don't take the results too seriously there is no harm in taking it. Makes the sponge wet, and makes you want to learn more if you suspect about yourself.

I don't know if they are "biased" one way or the other. I always got an ambiguous result ("you could be either NT or neurodiverse"), or even get "you're probably NT", but was later officially dxd as aspie. But they definitely are not accurate.

The book Autism in Heels claimed that that the professional tests she looked at were gender biased. Boys are more likely to be interested in trains than girls.

Toys have been gendered and girls steered away from toys that are popular with boys. And vice versa.
http://lettoysbetoys.org.uk/do-girls-love-trains/
Abbie felt ready for a ‘real model train set’ which she could build, drive and create scenery for, so they sat down together to view the options on the Toys R Us website. Says Kim, “All well and good until she noticed we hadn’t clicked the ‘girl’ selection at the side. Dutifully I clicked and lo and behold, the two more expensive options, more suited to her age group, disappeared, including the one she had her eye on.

lol yes! ^ ^

Fnordie Simpson!!