Thank You - Research Findings

[SummerAmy]

Hi everyone

A while ago I asked for help with my PhD research. I had more responses than I hoped, so thank you to anyone that took part. It means a lot, and hopefully I'll be able to publish the findings so that they may benefit people in the future.

I wanted to share a brief overview of some of my findings, so you can see what people's time and effort went into.

My research is investigating the relationship between interests and well-being. I took measures of how interested people are in each given interest, how often people engage in them, and to what extend they are a distraction. I also took measures of social, physical, psychological, and environmental well-being, as well as satisfaction with life.

Overall, mean interest, engagement, and distraction scores did not relate to any measures of well-being for the autistic participants. For neurotypical participants, mean interest score related to social well-being and mean engagement score related to social well-being and life satisfaction, but distraction score was not related to well-being. I have attached tables showing the individual activity domain relationships, as this is the easiest way to explain it! The coloured cells are where significant relationships are.



I also asked for the motivations behind partaking in preferred interest. AQ score positively correlated with intrinsic interest and knowledge, and engagement and flow (meaning these are higher motivators for autistic people), as well as negatively correlating with personal life values and goals, and prestige (meaning these are less important motivators).

I've been working on a mediation analysis as well, but I don't fully understand the results yet, so I can't update you on that! I hope what I've given is interesting to some of you though! It's not what I expected to find, but that's no reason not to share my findings!

Let me know if you have questions, I'll try my best to answer them.

Thanks,

Summer

 

[Ginseng]

Thank you.
You said “mean interest, engagement, and distraction scores did not relate to any measures of well-being for the autistic participants.“
Did your study indicate what did relate to our well being?

 

[SummerAmy]

Thank you.
You said “mean interest, engagement, and distraction scores did not relate to any measures of well-being for the autistic participants.“
Did your study indicate what did relate to our well being?

My research is only looking at interests. But if you take a look at the tables I attached, you can see a breakdown of the areas of interest. The blue cells are where an area of interest has related to well-being for autistic people. So for example, engaging in games and puzzles was related to social well-being.

 

[SusanLR]

Very interesting score sheets.
Thanks for sharing.

 

[interaural]

Hi Amy,

Thanks very much for returning with your results. It's especially interesting that you do this before your write-up is complete. The first thing that strikes me is that you don't find a relationship between your measures of interests and the well-being scores. This is surprising, given all the anecdotal reports of how much we enjoy pursuing our interests. Could this be because the WHO quality of life instrument doesn't work very well for autistic people? Has it ever been validated with an autistic population? I'd have thought that activities with a high intrinsic motivation (which you show for the autistic interests) would be associated with a high QoL score for a non-autistic population.

Also, the negative correlation between prestige as a motivation and AQ score made me smile. I guess most of know that our interests and the way we pursue them do not seem to bring us prestige with NTs!

 

[SummerAmy]

Hi Amy,

Thanks very much for returning with your results. It's especially interesting that you do this before your write-up is complete. The first thing that strikes me is that you don't find a relationship between your measures of interests and the well-being scores. This is surprising, given all the anecdotal reports of how much we enjoy pursuing our interests. Could this be because the WHO quality of life instrument doesn't work very well for autistic people? Has it ever been validated with an autistic population? I'd have thought that activities with a high intrinsic motivation (which you show for the autistic interests) would be associated with a high QoL score for a non-autistic population.

Also, the negative correlation between prestige as a motivation and AQ score made me smile. I guess most of know that our interests and the way we pursue them do not seem to bring us prestige with NTs!

I'm very aware of the feeling in our community that people are doing research 'on us' without any benefit to us, and as it had been about a year anyway, I didn't want anyone to think I'd forgotten about them! As this is PhD research, it may take another few years before I publish, so I thought some preliminary findings may be appreciated

I was very surprised by the findings also. There has been research validating the WHOQOL scale with autistic people, but I have a feeling something is still missing here. There have been more studies published whilst I have been doing data analysis, so I need to read over those and see if they are supporting or contradicting to those I've read already. My feeling is that the benefit we gain from our interests isn't picked up in the WHOQOL, in that they benefits a domain that isn't covered. I also obtain a significant mediation model when the full range of AQ score is included, rather than a group analysis like I had to do above, so it's possible that the way the sample is divided is restricting the results. When I've had a chance to run this past my supervisor, I will update the post