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Currently accepted at: JMIR Formative Research

Date Submitted: Jul 12, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 5, 2026 - Aug 30, 2026
Date Accepted: Oct 23, 2026
Date Submitted to PubMed: Oct 24, 2026
(closed for review but you can still tweet)

This paper has been accepted and is currently in production.

It will appear shortly on 10.2196/106266

The final accepted version (not copyedited yet) is in this tab.

An "ahead-of-print" version has been submitted to Pubmed, see PMID: 42925227

The SPECTRA Evidence Stack: A Rule-Specified Neuroaffirmative Framework for Integrating Multi-Source Evidence in Adult Neurodivergence Assessment

  • Lucas Fortaleza de Aquino Ferreira; 
  • Lenifer Siqueira Landim; 
  • Giovana Melo Bezerra Teixeira; 
  • Charlene Coleman; 
  • Ana Maria Luna Neri Benevides

ABSTRACT

Background:

Psychological assessment of adult neurodivergence relies on multi-informant data that frequently disagree; discrepancies may reflect masking, context-dependent expression, or limited self-insight rather than measurement error.

Objective:

This paper specifies the SPECTRA Evidence Stack, a rule-based, neuroaffirmative architecture that preserves cross-informant discrepancies as interpretable evidence rather than collapsing them into opaque scores, producing quality flags, convergence profiles, evidence-strength bands, and reason codes.

Methods:

This is a design specification, not a validation study: no clinical participants were involved. Framework behavior was evaluated on 250 author-generated synthetic records through a four-condition, prespecified rule-configuration comparison and a threshold-perturbation sensitivity analysis. Stochastic generation and score jitter were controlled by a recorded random seed.

Results:

With the disclosed code, version, and seed, the reference run was reproducible: mean evidence strength was 0.60 for the full-stack configuration, 0.53 for the no-quality comparator, 0.54 for the no-convergence comparator, and 0.50 for the baseline comparator. These descriptive differences verify the behavior of the four specified configurations; they are not causal estimates of the isolated effects of individual layers. The reference configuration is fully disclosed and independently runnable.

Conclusions:

Diagnostic accuracy, criterion validity, reliability, and clinical utility are not evaluated here and are reserved for a subsequent clinical validation study.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Ferreira LFdA, Landim LS, Teixeira GMB, Coleman C, Luna Neri Benevides AM

The SPECTRA Evidence Stack: A Rule-Specified Neuroaffirmative Framework for Integrating Multi-Source Evidence in Adult Neurodivergence Assessment

JMIR Formative Research. 23/10/2026:106266 (forthcoming/in press)

DOI: 10.2196/106266

URL: https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/106266

PMID: 42925227

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