Aging, cohorts, and verbal ability.

OBJECTIVES: Age-related differences in cognitive abilities observed in cross-sectional samples of individuals varying in age may in part be spurious due to the effects of cohort differences in schooling and related factors. This study examined the effects of aging on cognitive function controlling for any and all differences in cohort-based social experiences of different age groups. METHODS: We examined age-related patterns in a measure of verbal ability using 14 repeated cross-sectional surveys from the General Social Survey (GSS) over a 24-year period. RESULTS: The raw GSS data show the expected age-related growth and decline in vocabulary knowledge, but these age differences are reduced when adjusted for cohort differences. There is evidence of small age-related patterns in vocabulary knowledge within cohorts, but the curvilinear contributions of aging to variation in verbal scores account for less than one-third of 1% of the variance in vocabulary knowledge, once cohort is controlled. Cohort differences in schooling contribute substantially to this effect. DISCUSSION: Within-age-group variation in vocabulary knowledge is vastly more important than age differences per se, and the complexities of the relationship of verbal skills to historical differences in the experience of schooling present an interesting avenue for future research.

Aging and susceptibility to attitude change.

Two hypotheses about the relation between age and susceptibility to attitude change were tested. The impressionable years hypothesis proposes that individuals are highly susceptible to attitude change during late adolescence and early adulthood and that susceptibility drops precipitously immediately thereafter and remains low throughout the rest of the life cycle. The increasing persistence hypothesis proposes that people become gradually more resistant to change throughout their lives. Structural equation models were applied to data from the 1956-1960, 1972-1976, and 1980 National Election Panel Studies in order to estimate the stability of political attitudes and unreliability in measures of them. The results support the impressionable years hypothesis and disconfirm the increasing persistence hypothesis. A decrease in the over-time consistency of attitude reports among 66- to 83-year-olds was found to be due to increased random measurement error in their reports, not to increased attitude change.

Assessing the validity of the achievement motive in the presence of random measurement error.

The presence of random measurement error in indicators of theoretical constructs biases observed estimates of relations among those constructs. Correcting for this bias is particularly important when random measurement error is substantial, or is substantially different for indicators of distinct constructs included in a theoretical model. Validity assessment in the case of thematic apperceptive measures of the achievement motive (TAT n Achievement) has been vulnerable to interpretive errors because these indicators of the achievement motive are typically much less reliable than indicators of other constructs to which the motive may be related, and no correction has been made for the bias introduced by such differential measurement error. Here we illustrate a causal modeling approach to validity assessment for TAT n Achievement that incorporates explicit true-score measurement models of theoretical constructs. We confirm the hypothesis that the achievement motive construct is positively related to work satisfaction in a representative sample of adult males in the United States, taken in 1976 (N = 413). Evidence for the discriminant validity of story content versus story length, an issue raised in the literature on the TAT, is also presented in this nomological network.