Date of Award

5-2007

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Department

Graduate Department of Clinical Psychology

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine how concurrently valid a questionnaire of everyday memory is with several formal tests of memory. Memory questionnaire development was at an all time high in the late 1970's and early 1980's. During the mid 1980's there was an absence of interest in memory questionnaires as is evidenced by an absence of the topic in the literature. The questionnaires developed in the late 1970's and early 1980's yielded such varying results that it calls into question the reliability of both the memory questionnaires and the results of the studies that utilized them. A need for a reliable questionnaire with good psychometric properties that can be normed and shown to be valid is present in the literature. Of twelve existing questionnaires of everyday memory, the Everyday Memory Survey (EMS) has yielded better psychometric results than the others. In order to further study the psychometric properties of the EMS, this examiner administered the EMS, the Rivermead Behavioral Test of Memory- 2nd Ed. (RBMT-2) and the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-3), and the Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning 2nd Edition (WRAML-2) to 73 subjects, 51 who completed the entire battery and 22 who completed portions of the test battery. It was hypothesized that the EMS would be found to be concurrently valid with the RBMT-2 and the WRAML-2. This hypothesis was not fully supported. Specifically, only the EMS-observer form correlated with the RBMT-II however, both the EMS self and the EMS observer correlated with the WRAML-2 scores. Interestingly, the EMS-self and the EMS-observer forms did not correlate. For the EMS observer to correlate as well as it did with the WRAML-2 and the RBMT-2 is impressive. The EMS has potential as an assessment tool when used in the right setting and with the right population.

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