The Friendship Questionnaire: an investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism, and normal sex differences.
The Friendship Questionnaire shows adults with high-functioning autism care far less about close friendships than typical peers—use it to spot low social motivation fast.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Baron-Cohen et al. (2003) gave adults with Asperger or high-functioning autism a short paper called the Friendship Questionnaire.
Typical men and women filled it out too.
The team then compared the scores to see who valued close, empathic friendships.
What they found
The autistic adults scored far lower than both typical groups.
Their answers showed less interest in deep, emotional friendships and less drive to share feelings.
The gap was large enough to back the “extreme male brain” idea, since typical men already scored lower than typical women.
How this fits with other research
Chen et al. (2001) saw the same pattern two years earlier in teens: big friendship and social-skill deficits in Asperger boys.
Cashon et al. (2013) later asked teens with autism and their parents about friends. The teens claimed more friends than parents listed, showing self-report can hide gaps that show up on tools like the Friendship Questionnaire.
Bauminger et al. (2003) looked even younger. Mothers said their autistic kids had fewer, shorter playdates, mostly at home. Together the studies trace one clear line: friendship challenges start in childhood and stay strong into adulthood.
Why it matters
If you assess adults with ASD, add the Friendship Questionnaire to your intake packet. It takes five minutes and flags low social motivation, a target many programs skip. Pair it with parent or partner reports to catch teens or adults who may over-estimate their own social lives. When scores are low, write goals around shared enjoyment, not just social skills, and track change with the same quick form.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Friendship is an important part of normal social functioning, yet there are precious few instruments for measuring individual differences in this domain. In this article, we report a new self-report questionnaire, the Friendship Questionnaire (FQ), for use with adults of normal intelligence. A high score on the FQ is achieved by the respondent reporting that they enjoy close, empathic, supportive, caring friendships that are important to them; that they like and are interested in people; and that they enjoy interacting with others for its own sake. The FQ has a maximum score of 135 and a minimum of zero. In Study 1, we carried out a study of n = 76 (27 males and 49 females) adults from a general population, to test for previously reported sex differences in friendships. This confirmed that women scored significantly higher than men. In Study 2, we employed the FQ with n = 68 adults (51 males, 17 females) with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism to test the theory that autism is an extreme form of the male brain. The adults with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism scored significantly lower on the FQ than both the male and female controls from Study 1. The FQ thus reveals both a sex difference in the style of friendship in the general population, and provides support for the extreme male brain theory of autism.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2003 · doi:10.1023/a:1025879411971