Frequently Asked Questions

If you think you (or a relative) may be autistic, you may wish to seek a diagnosis from a medical practitioner. You should first discuss your thoughts with your General Practitioner (GP) or family physician. You can then ask your GP or physician to refer you for a formal diagnostic assessment by a multidisciplinary team or an individual experienced in diagnosing autism. Further information on diagnosis in the UK is also available via the National Autistic Society website, or from the NHS.

Not all autistic people choose to seek a diagnosis, which can be a long and sometimes difficult process. We support autistic people who choose not to seek a formal diagnosis, but we would encourage you to think carefully about the potential benefits of diagnosis, which can provide certainty or enable you to access support services to help with any difficulties that you encounter relating to autism. You may wish to read the National Autistic Society’s advice about choosing to seek a diagnosis, or try taking some of our tests. These tests may help you to understand whether you have traits that are characteristic of autism. Please note that, while some of our tests are used in clinical diagnostic settings, none are intended to be diagnostic in and of themselves. Your test results should only be used to inform your own judgement as to whether or not you may be autistic.

The Autism Research Centre (ARC) is purely an academic research centre at Cambridge University. We are therefore unable to offer clinical advice. Please contact your GP or family physician instead. If you are in the UK please contact the National Autistic Society (NAS)  for information about where to get clinical advice in your region.

As an academic research centre we cannot maintain an up-to-date list with this information.

Information is available on our webpage here: What is Autism?

Tests published by the Autism Research Centre (ARC) are available for free download from the Tests section of our website. Tests developed at the ARC can only be used for professional, scientific or clinical purposes, and not for commercial use. Use of these Tests for commercial purposes violates copyright. Full acknowledgement to the ARC as the source of the material must be given when using these tests, as well as the journal article where they were first described. You do not need permission to use the tests in your research because they are in the public domain. For use of tests with a commercial aspect, please contact Cambridge Enterprise to arrange permission.

All available tests that we have produced and validated can be found in the Tests section on our website.

All the information about each test that will allow you to understand how it should be used, scored and interpreted is accessible from the links that appear alongside each test in the Tests section of our website. These include instructions, scoring keys and relevant scientific research papers where the tests have been used, tested and validated. Please read these carefully to check whether the information you require is contained within these.

We recommend that you do not modify the wording in tests, as this could alter their interpretation and, in turn, affect the validity of the results of the test.

Scoring keys and research papers are placed alongside each individual test on our website. Please check these resources for more information. All the information about each test that will allow you to understand how it should be used, scored and interpreted can be found in the Tests section.

The AQ measures the number of autistic traits an individual has. Neither the AQ nor any of the other tests on the ARC website are diagnostic. Your AQ score simply tells you if you have a low, average, or high number of autistic traits.

Permission is not required to use any of our tests. You are welcome to download these tests provided that they are used for research purposes, and provided acknowledgement of the Autism Research Centre as the source is given.

Translations of tests produced by the Autism Research Centre are available in the Tests section of our website alongside the English versions. If a translation of a test is not available in your language, you are free to create a translation in your preferred language and send your translation to our team to post up on our website.

Please see our terms and conditions for translations of tests for further information and links. Full acknowledgement is given to you as the translator and your translation will be available for free from our website for other researchers to use. See Tests section for more details about how to submit a translated test.

If a language version of a test you want is not posted on our website, this is because a translation in this language has not yet been made.

If two or more translations of a given test in a given language have been made we encourage the translators to communicate between themselves to arrive at a consensus single translation in that language, to avoid confusion in the research community.

You are welcome to search our publications to read more about particular topics of our research.

As a research centre, we are actively enaged in about 30 projects at any one time, so are unable to answer queries on every possible research topic.

If you have a question about one of our research projects, please contact our admin team who will pass your query to the relevant scientist.

You can find out more about our research projects here.

Unfortunately we do not have the resources to explore additional topics beyond what we have been funded to do. We encourage you to publish your idea or your work so that it enters the public domain and so that it can go through peer review.

We only make available articles that are published by the Autism Research Centre. These can be found here.

The articles that we make available must not be for commercial use.

If you and your child (under the age of 16) would like to volunteer to take part in our research, please register here as a volunteer and complete the registration details.

We ask all parents of children under the age of 16 to register themselves first as the parent. Once you have completed your registration, you can register your children by clicking on the ‘register your child/ren’ link on the left-hand side of the welcome page. In addition to any autistic children, please register any non-autistic children in your family, as many of our studies seek to compare the differences between these two groups. You can then complete various questionnaires about yourself and your children, to help us better connect you to relevant projects. We will get in touch when specific research projects in which you and/or your children may be eligible to take part are recruiting participants (e.g. according to gender, age, and geographical location). Emails are sent out once a month, though you will only receive an email if there is a project in which you may be eligible to take part.

If you would like to donate to research, please find further details here.

If you would like to volunteer to take part in our research, please register here as a volunteer and complete the registration details.

We will get in touch when specific research projects you may be eligible to take part in are recruiting participants (e.g. according to gender, age, and geographical location). Emails are sent out once a month but you will only receive the email if there is a project you may be eligible to take part in.

If you would like to donate to research, please find further details here.

We also invite autistic people to apply for any of our vacant positions, in research or operations. For current opportunities, please visit the Cambridge University Jobs Page. Please see Research Opportunities for information about PhD, MPhil, and Postdoctoral opportunities.

If you have taken the AQ, EQ or SQ, immediate feedback is given after taking the test. We are still collecting data on the other tests and will post feedback about these tests in due course. We are unable to discuss individual score results. No single score on any of our tests or questionnaires indicates that an individual may be autistic.

If you think that you, or a friend or relative, may be autistic, you may wish to discuss this with your GP or family doctor or, in the UK, visit the National Autistic Society (NAS) website (www.autism.org.uk) for advice.

As an academic research group, we cannot advise on specific treatments or therapies.

The NAS maintains an advice page on treatments and therapies, which may be of use to you. The NHS also advises on treatments.

If these pages fail to answer your query, then you should discuss the matter instead with your GP or family doctor.

If you wish speak to one of our scientists for media purposes, please telephone the University Press Office on 01223 332300.

We are a busy academic department and regret that visitors to the Autism Research Centre are by invitation only.

We do not have the resources to meet visitors who are not coming to discuss a specific project, and many of our researchers are often off-site engaging with participants.

If you are interested in learning more about our research, please visit the Research section on our website.

Sadly we are unable to offer work experience to high school/secondary school students, because of our limited resources.

Sadly we are unable to offer internships, because of our limited resources.

If any research positions become available, these will be advertised on the University of Cambridge job pages

If you are interested in doing Doctoral or Masters level degree at the ARC, you should send a brief research proposal and your curriculum vitae to the potential supervisor, by email.

The ARC welcomes applicants from postdoctoral scientists in the field of biomedical and cognitive neuroscience aspects of autism spectrum conditions. Applicants should email the Director of the ARC with a research proposal, and should also consider applying to relevant charities or governmental bodies for grant support.

Unfortunately we cannot post your website link on our website due to University regulations.