Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale (RAADS-R)

Scoring
Each item is scored from 0 to 3: "True now and when I was young" = 3, "True only now" = 2, "True only when I was younger than 16" = 1, "Never true" = 0. The 17 items worded in the direction of typical functioning (1, 6, 11, 18, 23, 26, 33, 37, 43, 47, 48, 53, 58, 62, 68, 72, 77) are reverse-scored.

The total score ranges from 0 to 240 and breaks down into four subscales:

• Social relatedness: 39 items, from 0 to 117
• Circumscribed interests: 14 items, from 0 to 42
• Language: 7 items, from 0 to 21
• Sensory-motor: 20 items, from 0 to 60

Interpretation of the total score

• Below 65: generally not consistent with autism
• 65 to 105: some autistic traits, without a level clearly consistent with autism
• 106 to 139: generally consistent with autism; in-depth diagnostic assessment indicated
• 140 and above: pronounced autistic traits; in-depth diagnostic assessment indicated

Origin of the cutoffs

• 65 is the cutoff from the original validation study (Ritvo et al., 2011: 201 autistic adults, 578 non-autistic adults).
• 106 and 140 come from the NovoPsych revision (Hegarty et al., 2025). They were obtained by ROC analysis on 37,620 people who completed the RAADS-R and the AQ, using the AQ cutoffs (26 and 36) as the criterion rather than a clinical diagnosis. This work is a technical report, not published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• The subscale cutoffs come from the same revision (consistent / pronounced): social relatedness 49 / 64, circumscribed interests 20 / 28, language 8 / 11, sensory-motor 26 / 38. They are aligned with the percentiles of the total score and have not been validated separately.
• All these cutoffs were established on the English version. None of them comes from a French-language validation.

Translation The version offered is a translation made from the original scale by Ritvo et al. (2011). It has not been validated.

Limitations The cutoff of 65 produces many false positives in clinical populations: 81.5% of the NovoPsych clinical sample exceeds it, the French validation (Picot et al., 2021) reports 55.6% false positives among adults with other psychiatric disorders, and a study of adults referred for suspected ASD (Jones et al., 2021) finds very low specificity. This is what motivated the higher NovoPsych cutoffs. A high score indicates that an in-depth diagnostic assessment is relevant; it does not constitute a diagnosis. Conversely, a person who strongly compensates for or masks their traits may obtain a low score.