Results From Autism & Sexuality Survey

Autists down bad

A few months back I ran a survey that included questionnaires on autism, schizotypy, depression/anxiety¹, mating orientation², and sexual behaviour³. Most responses were collected via twitter, receiving a total of 147 completions (~75% male). Not a huge sample size, but would still be pretty good for a psychology study, and we might be able to squeeze some value out of it. While admittedly this sample is rather unrepresentative of the overall population, this is less critical for analyzing associations than it is for establishing baseline rates. As long as the associations hold relatively constant across different subgroups in the population, meaningful conclusions can still be drawn.

The autism quotient I employed was the AQ-Short, a 28-item measure of autistic traits across five subdomains: social skills, routine, switching, imagination, and numbers/patterns. A social behaviour factor subsumed the lower-order factors aside from numbers/patterns (which only weakly correlates with them).

I also included SPQ (Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire), but it was mostly a wash. The ‘interpersonal’ factor correlated highly with social AQ (.74 with the social skills subscale) and didn’t explain additional variance, and the others didn’t correlate with anything sexual, so we’ll just focus on the autism results here.

First, the correlations: