For thousands of autistic adults, every shift at work comes with a hidden second job: the continuous, exhausting labor of managing stress in environments that were never designed for their nervous systems. A new study from Germany argues that psychology has been measuring that hidden labor with the wrong instruments — and it offers the first draft of a better one. Researchers at the University of Hagen, working in close partnership with autistic employees themselves, have built a pilot coping inventory that captures strategies such as masking, stimming, strict routines, and sensory self-defense that mainstream questionnaires like the Brief COPE simply fail to register. The findings, published open access in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, arrive amid mounting evidence that standard coping theory, developed almost entirely on neurotypical populations, may misdescribe how autistic people actually regulate stress on the job — with real consequences for employment, mental health, and burnout in a community where fewer than half hold competitive jobs.
The stakes could hardly be higher. Autism spectrum conditions affect roughly one to two percent of adults, and while autistic employees bring well-documented workplace strengths — exceptional attention to detail, deep focus, systematic thinking — only an estimated 20 to 50 percent are engaged in competitive employment, with underemployment widespread. The gap is not explained by ability alone. Employment can deliver structure, purpose, and social inclusion, all key drivers of mental wellbeing, yet autistic employees are disproportionately prone to work-related stress and burnout. Researchers attribute this to a convergence of pressures: chronic sensory overload from harsh lighting, open-plan noise, and unpredictable interruption; heightened social demands such as meetings, small talk, and unwritten norms; and frequent co-occurring mental health conditions. Paradoxically, the two research fields that should have converged on the problem never quite met. Organizational studies proposed general accommodations like flexible schedules and sensory modifications without modeling how autistic traits interact with job demands, while clinical research documented elevated stress but rarely examined how it manifests in employment settings.
At the center of the measurement problem sits the Brief COPE, one of the most widely used self-report tools in stress psychology. The instrument packs fourteen subscales — active coping, planning, emotional support, denial, self-blame, religion, substance use, and others — into just two items each, rated on a four-point Likert scale. It rests on Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional model, which frames stress as arising when perceived demands exceed personal resources, and on the traditional assumption that problem-focused coping such as planning and help-seeking is instrumentally adaptive, whereas emotion-focused strategies like avoidance and rumination tend to exacerbate distress. Recent psychometric work suggests that machinery wobbles badly in autistic samples. When autistic older adolescents and adults completed the Brief COPE, researchers identified a six-factor structure — engagement coping, disengagement coping, support-seeking, self-blame, humor, and religion — that diverged markedly from neurotypical solutions. The same research program found emotion-focused coping associated with higher anxiety and depression in autistic adults, while engagement coping buffered the impact of stress on wellbeing. And behaviors central to autistic experience — stimming, reliance on routines, camouflaging known as masking — barely appeared at all.
To close the gap, a team led by Kerstin Erdal, with Marina Kröger and Johanna Finnemann, designed a participatory Grounded Delphi study — a hybrid method that fuses the structured, iterative consensus-building of the Delphi technique with the theory-generating logic of grounded theory, a combination considered especially well suited to fields where prior research is thin. Between January and March 2025, the researchers recruited five autistic employees aged 28 to 52, all in regular rather than sheltered employment with clinically confirmed diagnoses, screened descriptively using the RAADS-14, plus six professionals — autism therapists, employers, and counselors with two to thirteen years of direct experience — recruited through community forums, social media, and autism therapy centers in Northern Germany. Autistic participants completed three feedback rounds, experts two. Crucially, the study was participatory from the start: autistic community members helped design the questionnaires and interview guides, participant feedback reshaped the instrument at every stage, and the research team included researchers with autistic experience. The project was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework and approved by the University of Hagen’s ethics committee.
The first round amounted to a stress test of the Brief COPE itself. Autistic participants rated every item of the German version for relevance and comprehensibility on five-point scales, with room for open comments. The verdict was bruising. The two denial items — “I’ve been saying to myself ‘this isn’t real’” and “I’ve been refusing to believe that it has happened” — drew the lowest relevance ratings, averaging just 2.4. The substance-use item averaged 2.8 and scored poorly for comprehension, with participants objecting that it implied a targeted behavior of substance abuse; the religion item was judged marginal at 3.6. Even translation got in the way: the German rendering of “I’ve been expressing my negative feelings” — “Ich habe meinen Gefühlen freien Lauf gelassen” — was flagged as bafflingly metaphorical. For an instrument built to summarize coping in twenty-eight quick questions, the message was unmistakable: substantial parts of the scale were irrelevant, confusing, or both for autistic respondents, echoing earlier psychometric work showing unstable factor structures when the Brief COPE is applied to autistic populations.
Round two moved from ratings to lived experience. In semi-structured interviews of up to ninety minutes, conducted on-site and over Zoom, autistic employees described concrete workplace stress situations and what they actually did about them, while experts supplied observational and evaluative perspectives. Interviews were transcribed and independently coded in MaxQDA using inductive thematic analysis: two researchers built a shared codebook across repeated coding conferences, initially agreeing on only 25 to 90 percent of coded segments, then clarifying definitions and merging overlapping categories until final intercoder agreement ranged from 54 to 100 percent, averaging 89 percent across codes. Out of the process emerged 21 distinct categories of stress-management strategies, organized into three theory-based domains: the two existing Brief COPE domains of emotion-oriented and problem-oriented strategies, plus an entirely new third domain of autism-specific coping strategies. A few strategies came from only one side — an autistic participant’s mention of oversharing was folded into communication, while humor, cited by 60 percent of experts, was retained as problem-oriented coping on the strength of earlier autistic-sample research.
The autism-specific domain is where the inventory departs most radically from convention. Masking — suppressing one’s authentic autistic way of being — ranked among the most frequently mentioned strategies for both groups. Participants described tolerating harsh lighting, uncomfortable temperatures, smells, or forced handshakes because displaying authentic reactions might be deemed inappropriate, making masking a preventive shield against anticipated stigma. One worker put it starkly: “I’m always trying all the time to be completely normal so that no one notices anything about me — and I guess no one would really notice now, either. And maybe I even try to be at least better than everyone else.” Experts agreed masking is common — and warned it is also energy-draining. Order and routines ranked just as high: participants described planning entire workdays and treating routines as prerequisites for working at all. “I really believe that without my routines, everyday life wouldn’t be manageable at all,” one explained. Further strategies included reducing sensory stimulation through noise-cancelling headphones, sunglasses, informal “soft rules” for undisturbed work, or brief retreats to the toilet — though colleagues sometimes ignored soft rules, and office sunglasses felt conspicuously odd; stimming, with subtle, discreet versions at work distinguished from restorative sessions at home; special interests, framed preventively by autistic participants and recreationally by experts; and disclosure of diagnosis, which participants hoped would help colleagues understand their responses and enable employers to offer better support.
The other two domains confirmed that autistic employees draw on conventional strategies alongside trait-shaped ones. Under emotion-oriented coping — strategies aimed at regulating feelings rather than fixing the stressor — the categories included distraction, withdrawal, substance use, aggressiveness, self-endangering work behavior such as pushing through without breaks, and seeking emotional support. Under problem-oriented coping, aimed at the stressor itself or its consequences, the inventory captured finalizing tasks, drawing on personal resources, communication, self-initiated, employer-initiated, and interactional workplace adaptations, health-oriented strategies, humor, and instrumental support. The team stresses that coping proved highly context-dependent: strategies rooted in core autistic traits, such as the need for routine and sensory sensitivity, intertwine with external supports like employer accommodations and interactional clarity, and some strategies serve several purposes at once — preventing stress before it starts, managing others’ expectations, or defusing acute crises — with more enduring interpersonal consequences than moment-to-moment tactics.
Round three brought the draft back to the people who inspired it. In a final online survey, both groups rated every category for relevance to work stress and for clarity, adding free-text comments. The autistic participants rated all categories as highly relevant, with mean scores between 4 and 5 on the five-point scale, and every item scored 4 or 5 for understandability. In open comments they reported that the inventory had captured their coping experiences at work well, asking mainly for simpler wording. The experts agreed, with two exceptions: an item describing a special interest as an “inner retreat” during stressful periods was judged ambiguous and flagged for shortening, and an item about skipping breaks or meals to get more done was criticized for implying that self-endangerment was a goal-directed choice. The result is a pilot inventory, published in the supplementary materials, designed to sit alongside established instruments in coaching and intervention rather than to replace them outright.
The authors are deliberate about what the inventory does and does not claim. It describes the range of strategies autistic employees use; it does not rank their long-term adaptiveness. Masking and self-endangering behaviors such as skipping meals may be functional in the short term — enabling task completion or smoothing social friction — while carrying longer-term costs in fatigue and psychological strain, and weighing immediate effectiveness against those costs was beyond the study’s scope. The findings align with the neurodiversity paradigm, which treats neurodevelopmental differences as natural variation and emphasizes fit between individual needs and environmental demands, and with occupational health models built on person-environment fit. Limitations are real: the sample was small, well-educated, and relatively homogeneous; diagnoses were self-reported; experts may over-represent people who seek support or disclose; and no outcomes such as job retention, wellbeing, or performance were measured. The team calls for quantitative validation in larger, more diverse samples, factor analysis of the inventory’s psychometric properties, and longitudinal work linking coping types to burnout, job satisfaction, and retention. As a first map of a territory psychology has largely left blank, the message is unambiguous: understanding how autistic employees actually cope means making room — in theory and in measurement — for the strategies their neurology creates.
Subject of Research: Identifying workplace stress coping strategies used by autistic adults and developing a pilot coping inventory through a participatory Grounded Delphi study with autistic employees and professionals
Subject of Research: Medicine
Article Title: Developing an Inventory of Workplace Stress Coping Strategies Among Autistic Adults: A Grounded Delphi Study
Article References: Erdal, K., Kröger, M., & Finnemann, J. (2026). Developing an Inventory of Workplace Stress Coping Strategies Among Autistic Adults: A Grounded Delphi Study. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07507-w
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07507-w
Keywords: stress, coping, autism, neurodiversity, workplace, employment, Brief COPE, masking, stimming, routines, sensory stimulation, Delphi method
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Glenn Wilkins. (August 30, 2026). New Inventory Maps How Autistic Adults Cope with Workplace Stress. Scienmag. https://scienmag.com/new-inventory-maps-how-autistic-adults-cope-with-workplace-stress/
Glenn Wilkins. “New Inventory Maps How Autistic Adults Cope with Workplace Stress.” Scienmag, 30 August 2026, https://scienmag.com/new-inventory-maps-how-autistic-adults-cope-with-workplace-stress/. Accessed 30 August 2026.
Glenn Wilkins. “New Inventory Maps How Autistic Adults Cope with Workplace Stress.” Scienmag. August 30, 2026. https://scienmag.com/new-inventory-maps-how-autistic-adults-cope-with-workplace-stress/
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