ATTITUDES TOWARDS AUTISM AND LEARNING DISABILITIES.

Hi Lee,

As Zoe mentioned, the community rules - https://community.autism.org.uk/p/rules - do not allow research, surveys or questionnaires to be posted on the forums without permission:

• 'Requests for research study subjects and surveys need to be directed to research@nas.org.uk for data protection and research ethics reasons. Further information can be found on our research pages. Please be advised that any requests for research subjects or surveys posted on the Community will be deleted without warning. '
  
  

Therefore the link to the survey has been removed for the moment, and this thread will be locked. If you email the address above and get permission to post it, the thread can be unlocked and the link reinstated.

Thanks,
Ross - mod

I have gone through the survey and it appears to be about learning disabilities, not autism.  The title here is misleading.

JuniperFromGallifrey said:

I cannot tell you how often I send an email with several points and the response I receive back completely ignores most of them. An autistic individual wouldn't do this, but many non-autistics do.

So true! I get so annoyed when this happens but I also wonder how everyone at work seems to keep on top of their email better than me. It’s because they are just being slack!  When I get a response to my questions under each point in a different colour it makes me happy!

That being said, and rather hypocritically, I apologise for ignoring the original question in this post, I just had to reply to the above! 

To consent, your form states: 

• I do not have a learning disability diagnosis.

I would suggest to have "I don't know" buttons between the True and False. 

If you'd like a better collexion of the random public, I'd suggest open public forums. The NAS forum may skew results as there are quite a lot of individuals here who know and accept others with 'learning disabilities' which many adults here were diagnosed with. Unfortunately the criteria for learning doesn't take into account a different way of learning. For instance, many can learn if given the audio instead of a book. Or a paper book instead of a tablet. Some learn hands on and some won't learn if overloaded with too much all at once. Once I learned Logic it revolutionised my ability to learn. I had the capacity to understand the basics of this when much younger but wasn't offered it. autistics are known for needing fundamental first - ground up learning rather than given pieces out of order and out of context, also known as top down. But since a better method of instruction doesn't always exist, society can blame the party who doesn't understand rather than adjusting how it's explained. 

For instance, you'll learn far more about tactile elements by engaging with them rather than reading about them. But you'd be surprised how often this isn't the first port of call. 

One thing that's often talked about here is being too overwhelmed to intake information in a way that creates impact and is recalled. Autistics are often left unseen for their potential and simply assumed to have a learning disability instead of given a mentor who can relate with them and communicate in a way that makes sense.

I want to add, I cannot tell you how often I send an email with several points and the response I receive back completely ignores most of them. An autistic individual wouldn't do this, but many non-autistics do. So I'm really not sure who has a disability. 

But in the spirit of this, I want to repeat: Add and "I don't know" buttons between the True and False. 

This has received ethical and GDPR approval from The Open University Dept. of Psychology