First Report

This is the first feed back report of my doctoral research looking at the effectiveness of video as an educational tool for people on the autistic spectrum.

The study involves adults on the autistic spectrum and a control group who are not on the autistic spectrum. Participants will respond to a questionnaire about their video-watching and buying habits, view one or more educational videos (or parts of videos) about autism or related subjects and answer questions about them. For a more complete introduction to the study please refer to my earlier blog:

http://autvideo.blogspot.com/2007/12/introduction-to-my-research.html

The URL for the Questionnaire is here .

http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/bham/autvideo

The on line questionnaire was launched on 20^th January and in the first day has had over fifty respondents. This has revealed a couple of snags with the questionnaire which future respondents may wish to take note of.

Question 13: about occupation does not allow more than one answer, so that if someone is both working and a parent with caring responsibilities they cannot tick both boxes. The purpose of the question was to get a rough guide to respondents economic status and the inability to give multiple answers so this is an oversight I apologise for.

If you are both working and a parent there is opportunity to signify that you are a parent in the final open question 20: if you wish to.

I have also had responses that the reference in question 3: “in the last year” is ambiguous. This refers to the time period of 1 year’s duration, not the calendar year that has just begun. This is consistent with the same usage in the previous question that refers to specific time periods of question 2.

It is inevitable that problems of respondent’s interpretations occur in any questionnaires which I have issues of the same kind myself with the Cambridge AQ and EQ questionnaires which were developed and tested to give a standardised measure, yet there is still subjectivity in the responses that can be made.

However that does not invalidate their use in this study or others for the purposes of comparison.