Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised

[Guest guest]

:

Thanks for the link. I printed it out and took the test. This test just seemed

very black and white to me.

Just me.

[Guest guest]

...

The questionnaire was designed to have persons it's administered make forced choices. That's one of the advantages of working through a thoroughly pre-tested instrument which has just enough similar questions within the questionnaire to test for internal consistency and internal cross-validity. This is because the wishy-washy inclination of some folks to answer between the lines, off scale, and with "conditions" would otherwise render the whole thing invalid.

Done with a purpose in mind, and also done to include the proposed "all under the same tent" criteria for ASD in the DSM-5.

Read the authors' discussion of their methodology in the article before page 8, and review their statistics and techniques used to proof their numbers. Given your most recent contact with statistics and research methodology, reading the article itself might be a bit easier for you. The authors have properly identified cautions and misgivings they have about the instrument. They invite others to further develop their technique, especially to insure uniformity in its administration and replicate their test and development process in the field with an adequate number of adults so as to assure scientific validity to what they've set out to measure The RAADS-R is a vast improvement to the work of other authors of older scales whose authors didn't use half the available tools in developing their diagnostic scales, extrpolated results to adults from their test and control groups which were mainly children and adolescents, and since those older scales such as the ADOS were released have relied upon uncritical acceptance of their instruments.

The one thing I didn't disclose to folks is that a great number of the questions in the RAADS-R bear an eery similarity to questions I included in my expanded, "adult Australian Scale" to the Attwood/Garnett 1995 scale starting way back in 2000. I also ran it up the flagpole with Myles who'd just started the autism graduate program at the University of Kansas. She wasn't able to get grad students at that time to take on an adult diagnostic scale for their doctoral level work, so that hoped-for project never took off in America's heartland. For five years I freely shared my first questionnaire extensively with Attwood and others, and it looks as though they finally caught the message about asking detailed questions about mature adult functions and roles.

There was an Australian psychologist who had seen my early questionnaire and teased out individual questions from some of my multiple-item questions.From a mere editorial and readability vantage point, his efforts were very helpful. He didn't develop the questionnaire for further use in the formal diagnostic process mainly because he wasn't a researcher. There was an educational psychologist on the East Coast (Virginia) who developed additional items and parameters for a more complex version of my questiionnaire, and I've let C. Rick Ellis, Ed.D. continue on with his efforts even though he copyrighted "his work" with no mention of how much of my scale he'd actually cribbed, word for word, item for item. I've had no expectation for recognition by the folks who've gone out and done the heavy academic lifting, but I do have all of those earlier, unscientifically developed best hunch items in three early versions of the adult scale I developed, and, as I said, with the possible exception of sensory items which I didn't focus on twelve years ago but did mention, the RAADS-R is "comfortably familiar."

Nuff said.

N. Meyer

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