Anemone's Research Emporium

The Friendship Questionnaire (FQ)

Anemone Cerridwen
June 20, 2008

The paper: Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright, 2003. The Friendship Questionnaire: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism, and Normal Sex Differences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 33, No. 5, October 2003.

This study does two things:

1. It provides a friendship questionnaire (FQ) with items based on what is written in the literature on male and female styles of friendship.

"An individual scores highly on the FQ if they report enjoying close, empathic supportive friendships; liking and being interested in people; enjoying interaction with others for its own sake; and finding friendships important." [page 510]

Females score higher than males. Mean score for males was 70.3; mean score for females 90.0. The score range is 0 to 135.

2. It compares the scores of autistic subjects to non-autistic subjects, in order to test the assumption that autistic people have extreme male brains (the extreme male brain (EMB) theory). The mean score for autistic males was 53.2; for females it was 59.8.

This study assumes

1. that you can place male and female friendship styles on a single linear axis and rate them as higher or lower in friendship, and that higher scores indicate a more feminine brain, and
2. if autistic people get lower scores, then they have more masculine brains.

First of all, putting male and female friendship styles on a single linear axis and ranking them on "friendship" sounds pretty sexist to me. The authors state:

"It is important to stress that the FQ has been designed to be neutral in terms of the value placed on the "male" and "female" style of friendships. That is, the wording is carefully chosen to indicate that individuals might value or prefer different things in relationships (e.g., confiding vs. shared activities), and that one preference is not better or worse than another--just different. As such, a particular score on the FQ is not indicative of any need for intervention, per se."

However, they do assign more points to the female style than to the male style, so it's hard to take their argument that they do not consider one style better than the other seriously. The general point of the literature on male-female differences is that the two sexes have two different styles, not that one sex or the other has more friends or a better style of friendship. Relationships may be more important overall to woman than men, and women may put more time and energy into them than men, but that doesn't mean you can compare relationship styles to give individual people a "friendship" ranking, or consider women to have higher "friendship-ness". It may well be suitable to consider the amount of time and energy people spend on their friendships, as well as whether the friendships are accomplishing what people want them to, but the style of friendship should surely be irrelevant?

If the Friendship Questionnaire is going to work for me, I'd want to see all items that score a person on their style of friendship removed, in order to avoid sexist bias. Alternately, if the difference in male and female styles is important, then have two scales, one for each style, to see how much a person leans in one way or the other. That might say something about the underlying personality of the person. I'd also want to remove all items that discriminate on the basis of ability (e.g. phone versus email for people with information processing issues), rather than preference, since ability and preference are two different things. Furthermore, a scale is not a scale in my book until it's been through a factor analysis or three. How do the authors know the items measure what they say they do? You can't tell by looking. For example, the authors seem to assume that whether people prefer enjoy an open office plan or a private office, with or without conversation, has something to do with friendship. But it may actually have more to do with ability to concentrate in each setting. The only way to tell if this is about friendship or not is to see which other items this item clusters with in a factor analysis. And if it turns out that male and female styles of friendship really do belong on a single scale, this should show up in the factor analysis as well.

In addition, I might suggest that 27 males and 49 females really aren't enough subjects to properly validate a questionnaire.

Second of all, even if this FQ were relevant, low scores for autistic subjects do not necessarily mean autistic people are lower in "friendship-ness". The scale may be measuring different things in autistic people than in non-autistic people. For example, autistic people typically have sensory issues, have difficulty following conversations, and have difficulty making friends. This probably affects their style of friendship when they do have friends, but not the importance of friendship. And even if the autistic friendship style resembles the typical male style more than the typical female style, it may be for different reasons (e.g. ability rather than preference). Additionally, the number of friends autistic people have may in no way reflect their interest in friendship, since autism may make people unable to make friends and socialize as much as they want to. There is a big difference between voluntary solitude and involuntary solitude.

It may well be fascinating to compare the autistic friendship style (if there is one) with that of typical men and women, but comparisons should be made with caution, since what is on the surface may not reflect what is underneath very well.

And in addition, I would like to point out (as I am going to do with pretty much any critique I write that discusses sex differences) that it is possible that autistic females are underdiagnosed compared to males, precisely because they do not conform to male autistic stereotypes. (This happened with ADHD in the beginning and has since been corrected.) So all theories that consider autistic people to be more "masculine" in any way should be taken with a large grain of salt. At least for the next decade or two.

For the record, I'm autistic and female, and I scored 96.