08/08/2026
Published! Special edition of Neurodiversity Journal: "Development of a Narrative-Based Assessment for Autism in Adult Females."
When this study began, nearly five years ago, the projection was fifty participants. There was no institutional or grant funding, no advertising, no recruitment machinery, and no shortage of people who thought the premise was questionable: that autistic women, given time, privacy, and the freedom to write, could produce the clinical evidence that interviews were designed to extract from them and consistently failed to reach.
Nearly a thousand women answered. 988 narratives, from the United States, the United Kingdom, Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Every participant arrived through word of mouth. Not one recruitment advertisement was placed. Autistic women told other autistic women that the research was rigorous, that the protocol respected them, and that they would be heard. That was the entire recruitment strategy, and it built a sample larger than most funded studies achieve.
Their writing built this instrument. Eight thematic domains emerged from those narratives and now form the foundation of the WRADIANCE, an instrument and assessment protocol that shifts diagnostic authority from clinician observation to the participant's own account of her life. Seventy-six percent of participants reported that the written format let them express what they had never been able to say aloud. Eighty-nine percent expressed relief at not facing an interview.
This is autistic-designed and autistic-led research: organic, participant-authored, and built on the conviction that autistic women are the authorities on their own experience.
The article has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Neurodiversity (SAGE), in the special issue Towards a Critical Turn in Neurodiversity Studies: Bridging the Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences. It is open access and free to read and share.
Read it here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/27546330261470896
To the 988 women who participated: this is yours.
This paper introduces an autistic-led and developed narrative-based assessment protocol addressing the paradigmatic and systematic underdiagnosis of autism in a...
