Copyright 1998, Jill Fain Lehman. All rights reserved.
Question 5 of the survey asked for three current favorite titles (5a), three most played titles in the past (5b), up to three titles that were disliked (5c) and up to three titles of which the child was afraid (5d). Answers to the request for current and past favorite titles were combined and no rank ordering was inferred from the responses. The ASD group provided 274 responses to questions 5a and 5b, or an average of 5.23 titles per child. The TD group provided 188 responses to questions 5a and 5b, or an average of 4.32 titles per child.
Titles from questions 5a and 5b were placed into one of twelve categories for the purposes of comparison across groups:
| Category | ASD | TD |
|---|---|---|
| Authoring | 11% | 11% |
| Game | 4% | 11% |
| Language | 24% | 15% |
| Math | 8% | 10% |
| Mixed/academic | 16% | 16% |
| Mixed/other | 5% | 3% |
| Music | 3% | 1% |
| Problem solving | 8% | 12% |
| Reference | 4% | 1% |
| Science | 8% | 7% |
| Thematic activity center | 6% | 7% |
| Unknown | 4% | 5% |
The bulk of the difference between the populations appears to lie in the disparity between use of games (especially, shoot 'em ups) and language-related software. This makes sense in light of two factors revealed above: ASD children's aversion to competition and the majority of purchases made by parents.
Of the 44 typically-developing children represented in the survey, 16 (36%) expressed a dislike for at least one software title they had tried and 3 (7%) expressed fear in connection with at least one title. For the children with ASD, the percentages were 47% (25/53) and 13% (7/53) for dislike and fear, respectively. Although the trend is in the direction we would expect (less satisfaction for the ASD children with off-the-shelf titles), neither measure shows a significant difference between groups.