Frequently asked questions
What are these questionnaires?
Two screening questionnaires. Screening means they measure how far your answers match the descriptions the questionnaire sets out. They do not give a diagnosis and they cannot. A diagnosis comes from a professional, through a clinical interview, with history and an assessment of how you are coping.
A high score means a conversation with a professional is a reasonable next step. A low score rules nothing out.
RAADS-R
Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale, Revised. 80 statements across four subscales: social relatedness, language, sensory and motor, circumscribed interests. The score runs from 0 to 240. Published by Ritvo and colleagues in 2011.
CAT-Q
Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire. 25 statements across three subscales: compensation, masking, assimilation. The score runs from 25 to 175. Published by Hull and colleagues in 2019.
It does not measure autism. It measures how much effort goes into appearing unremarkable in social situations. That is why people usually take it alongside RAADS-R rather than instead of it.
How reliable are the cut-offs?
Less than they look. A cut-off is a number somebody picked on some sample of people, and another sample often gives a different number.
For RAADS-R this is worst. The original paper proposes 65, and this site shows 65. Later work disagrees:
- Sizoo and colleagues, 2015, propose 98.
- Brugha and colleagues, 2020, find 120 separates better.
- Jones and colleagues, 2021, report specificity as low as 3 percent, which means almost everyone lands above the line.
- NovoPsych, across 63,209 administrations, recommends 106 and 140.
In practice: a score above 65 is very common and on its own says little. The subscales and the individual answers carry more than a single number does.
For CAT-Q the cut-off is 100. The authors also report different values by gender, which this site does not yet separate.
The translation is not validated. What does that mean?
Both questionnaires were written in English. Every number about them, the cut-offs, the sensitivity and the specificity, was established on English statements, with people who read them in English.
A translation is allowed to exist. The RAADS-R and CAT-Q licences explicitly grant the right to adapt, which covers translating. What a translation does not inherit is the numbers. A properly validated translation of a clinical instrument goes through forward translation, back translation, an expert committee and cognitive debriefing with speakers of the language. No translation on this site has been through that.
So the site records which language a questionnaire was answered in and says so beside the result. The language cannot be changed part way through. Results can be read in any language, but the warning stays attached to the language they were answered in.
Who are these questionnaires for?
RAADS-R was validated on adults aged 18 and over and is not intended for children or adolescents. CAT-Q was validated from age 16 up, and its authors state it is not known whether the properties hold for adolescents and younger children. A separate Swedish study found validity problems below 15.
What happens to my answers?
They stay in your browser. No account, no cookies, no database. Scoring runs on your device.
The result travels in the part of the address after the #. A browser
does not send that part to a server, so even the server that hands
you this page never sees your answers.
Two kinds of link are offered:
- The summary carries scores and subscales only. Individual answers are not in it and cannot be reconstructed from it.
- The full link also carries every individual answer. It is useful for a therapist or doctor. It is not for public sharing.
After you finish, the address bar holds the summary, so copying the address cannot accidentally share every answer. The full link takes a deliberate click.
The link is obfuscated, not encrypted. The key sits in the site's own code and is public. Obfuscation stops the answers being readable at a glance. It does not protect them from anyone who sets out to decode them.
Visits to the page are counted anonymously. The part of the address holding the answers is stripped before anything is sent. Everything that gets counted is on the statistics page.
Why can I not save my result?
Because saving it would mean keeping it somewhere. The link is the saved result. Put it wherever you keep your things.
An unfinished questionnaire also lives in the address, so reloading the page loses nothing.
Sources and licences
Both autism questionnaires are printed inside their own papers, so the licence on the paper covers the instrument itself.
| Questionnaire | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| RAADS-R | Ritvo RA et al. (2011). J Autism Dev Disord 41(8):1076-89. PMC3134766 | CC BY-NonCommercial |
| CAT-Q | Hull L et al. (2019). J Autism Dev Disord 49(3):819-33. PMC6394586 | CC BY 4.0 |
This site may not make money. The RAADS-R licence forbids commercial use, so there is no advertising, no paid tier, no sponsorship and no selling of reports. Forever.
Why does this site exist?
Because the breakdown by subscale is what makes a score useful, and the places that offered it for free started charging for it. The questionnaires are free. Their scoring should be too.
Can I get in touch?
Yes, about a short list of things: a mistake in the Croatian translation, a question about the licences, or a page or link that does not work.
This is not a route to clinical advice. Nobody here can tell you what your score means for you, or whether to seek an assessment. A high score means a conversation with a professional is a reasonable next step. A low score rules nothing out.