The Broader Autism Phenotype and College Students' Choice of Majors: Validity of the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAP-Q)

Background:  When Individuals have the Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP), they exhibit characteristics of ASD that aren’t severe enough to merit a clinical diagnosis. Anxiety, loneliness, and social dysfunction are often associated with these characteristics, and can be debilitating in daily life. Because many individuals with the BAP possess these characteristics, yet don’t have a clinical diagnosis, they experience more difficulty qualifying for professional help including academic accommodations. This is true for college students who have the BAP.

Objectives:  Our objective was to explore the association between characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)—known as the Broader Autism Phenotype—and college major choice, and examine the validity of the Broader Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAP-Q) and the Autism Quotient (AQ).

Methods:  We recruited 1043 undergraduate students (female=56%) from a large, western, private university using convenience sampling by offering course credit and utilizing the university's online research participation system (SONA). We measured the BAP by administering two measures to the participants: the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAP-Q).

Results:  We explored the relationship between the BAP-Q and the AQ by investigating the correlation between the total scores for the two measures. In our sample (n = 1,043), the BAP-Q and the AQ were strongly correlated at r = 0.69 (p < 0.01). We calculated the number of males and females who scored at or above the BAP-Q cutoff scores for the BAP. We found that 9.1% (n = 42) of male students scored above the suggested cutoff of 3.55, while 16.9% (n = 98) of females scored above the suggested cutoff of 3.17. MANOVA and post hoc comparisons revealed that students in the colleges of "mathematic sciences" as well as "engineering and technology" scored significantly higher on both the AQ and BAP-Q than students in other colleges.

Conclusions: The primary purpose of our study was to explore the relationship between The Broader Autism Phenotype and college major choice. Both of our measures—the AQ and BAP-Q—revealed significant differences among colleges. The results from both the AQ and BAP-Q showed that students in physical and mathematic sciences as well as engineering and technology scored higher on The BAP, supporting the preliminary research of Baron-Cohen (1998) and Baron-Cohen et al. (2001). This finding indicates there may be a greater need to provide support to students majoring in these specific fields. Providing better support to such may also include the need for professors to adjust teaching accordingly. A secondary purpose of our study was to assess the psychometric properties of the BAP-Q. We found that the BAP-Q has high convergent validity with the AQ, which further supports the BAP-Q as a good measure of The BAP.  Finally the cut scores set in place in the BAP-Q for women seems to be too low, as there were unexpectedly more women who passed the cut score than men. This suggests that the cut score for women may need to be readjusted to a higher level.