Table 4.

Excerpts of narratives differing in quality from individuals with ASD and ASD controls during the “Farmland Image” of the TAT

Example of strong narrative quality in ASD control	Example of medium quality narrative quality in individuals with ASD
Age = 19.0, sex = female, FSIQ = 118, VIQ = 121, PIQ = 109	Age = 34.9, sex = male, FSIQ = 116, VIQ = 101, PIQ = 131, ADOS severity = 7
Similaritya = 0.70	Similaritya = 0.38
Okay. So there’s a young girl named Jane and she grew up on a farm. Um. The school she goes to is wait she grew up on a farm. And her schoolteacher is very inspiring and encourages really world learning. But her parents just want her to have the lifestyle of a farm girl and just stay in the farm. But Jane really wants to explore the world like her teacher is telling her to. So she’s in the dilemma. As much as she wants to respect her parents she decides to travel and gets the education she wanted.	It looks like it takes place in like the eighteen hundreds. And there’s like a farm with fields. And the guy was telling the woman just that he was going out to work in the fields. And they live on a farm. There was probably corn out there. I think there was a cow in the background.

^aNarrative quality closer to 1 is higher quality