Request for help with research project

April 23, 2004

Dear fellow parents,

I am a mother of a 10 year old with autism, and I'm a student. I am in a

statistics class and today was given a project to work on in a group. I

suggested to the members of my group that we do a project about autism and

it was very sweet. They were totally interested. One girl said that her cousin

was just diagnosed with autism a few months ago, and another said that her

boyfriend is autistic. They all don't know very much about autism, but are now

very excited about working on this with me. I suggested that the simplest

thing that we could do would be to look at the trend of increasing autism and

we could just pick what geographic domain to look at. They wanted to do

something much more interesting. One girl said " Eh, we all know autism is

increasing. Let's look at something that will actually teach us something and

the class something too. " I'm really impressed and don't want to let the group

down. My suggestion then, was to see if there is a correlation between the

number of siblings with spectrum disorders and their respective Childhood

Autism Rating Scale. This interested them and we all agreed. The problem is

that I haven't been able to find any databases with anything much more than

prevalence data.

I'm posting to this list to ask for your help. If you know your child's CARS

score, would you mind sending it to me, along with the number of siblings with

ASD (if any)? It of course needs to be anonymous, so all I need is those two

numbers (or if you have multiples, a pair of numbers for each child). We need

as many responses as we can get as soon as we can get them, because our

sample size needs to be fairly large and we need to present our data

(uninterpreted) on Monday. Please e-mail the information to me at

klevermore@.... Thank you in advance for your help.

Karla Levermore-Rich

Mom of Kaleb and Kira

Recommended Posts