The name is absent

Several of the continuous variables differed significantly from normal distributions,
according to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and their skewness ratios. All analyses were
therefore carried out using non-parametric tests (Spearman’s rho, Mann-Whitney U,
Wilcoxon’s signed ranks test). They were also repeated using parametric alternatives
(Pearson’s r, independent-samples and paired-samples t-tests respectively), which are
known to be reasonably robust to deviations from normality. In all cases the overall
patterns of results were the same so parametric analyses are not reported separately.
Research questions

• Can adults with autism engage with the AAI? If so, are they less likely than adults
without autism to be classified as secure?

The participants in the present study were all able to engage with the AAI sufficiently to
provide transcripts that could be scored according to the usual criteria, and the general
pattern of their classifications is described above. An expected distribution of AAI
classifications in adults without autism was obtained from the meta-analysis by van
IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg (1996), which gives distributions for both clinical
and non-clinical samples. The non-clinical samples are reported separately for men and
women, although the distributions are not markedly different; the male sample was chosen
for comparison because the present sample contained more men than women. The meta-
analysis reports CC and U together as one disorganised category. Using chi-square tests,
the present participants’ AAI classifications differ significantly from the non-clinical
meta-analysis whether viewed as two categories (χ² = 15.18, df = 1, p < .001), three
categories (χ² = 15.43, df = 2, p < .001) or four categories (χ² = 15.22, df = 3, p = .002). In
the cases of three and four categories, two and three cells respectively had expected values
below five, so these results should be interpreted with caution.

The clinical sample of van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg (1996) was

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