Measurement effects in cognitive testing

SBI contributors

Project description

Panel effects pose a dilemma to survey methodology: For all the analytic potential repeated measurements offer, the repetition itself can bias results. This is especially true for measures that give the respondent an opportunity to improve by learning, such as memory tasks. SHARE offers a unique opportunity to study such panel effects in memory tests. The study has administered a word recall test to respondents in many countries, repeating the measurement roughly every two years and randomly assigning one of four word lists for the respondents to recall. This randomization enables us to compare respondents who received the same list in two consecutive interviews to respondents with differing lists, which constitutes a reliably randomized experiment. Studying this comparison might illuminate how repeated measurements might impact memory test results even across several years. This project aims to identify such potential panel effects and will hopefully be able to inform researchers on how to take them into account in their research.

Status

Active

Selected publications

Fernández, I., Tomás, J., & Bethmann, A. (2023). Latent trajectories of recent and delayed memory and their predictors: Evidence from SHARE. International Psychogeriatrics, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610222001016