The MRC National Survey of Health of Development (NSHD) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 11 sweep using the Vocabulary measure.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain | Verbal (comprehension) | |
| Measures: | Lexical Knowledge/word understanding | |
| CHC: | Gc (Crystallized intelligence) | |
| Administration method: | Teacher/psychologist/trained individual; face to face; read aloud | |
| Procedure: | After the participant completed the word reading task, the interviewer asked the child whether they knew the meaning of each word, e.g. "What is a ___", "What do we mean by ___". The interviewer noted the number of correct responses. The overall testing session at age 11 lasted under 2 hours. | |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://skylark.ucl.ac.uk/NSHD/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=questionnaires:1957_sm_nf3.pdf (opens in new tab) | |
| Scoring: | One mark for each correct word (0 - 50) | |
| Item-level variable(s): | Not currently available | |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | VOC11R, VOC11R57, VOC1157, VOC11N | |
| Descriptives: | Raw score | Normalised score |
| N = 4,027 | N = 4,027 | |
| Range = 0 - 49 | Range = 50 - 153 | |
| Mean = 29.99 | Mean = 102.25 | |
| SD = 7.45 | SD = 15.33 | |
(click image to enlarge) | (click image to enlarge) |
|
| Age of participants (months): | Mean = 130.33, SD = 1.06, Range = 128 - 137 | |
| Other sweep and/or cohort: | NSHD – Age 8 – Vocabulary | |
| BCS70 – Age 10 – BAS Word Definition | ||
| ALSPAC – Age 8.5 – WISC-III Vocabulary | ||
| Source: | Pigeon DA. Tests used in the 1954 and 1957 surveys. In: Douglas JWB, ed. The home and the school. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964. (Appendix 1.) | |
| Technical resources: | None | |
| Reference examples: | Richards, M., Hardy, R., Kuh, D., & Wadsworth, M. E. (2001). Birth weight and cognitive function in the British 1946 birth cohort: longitudinal population based study. BMJ, 322(7280), 199-203. | |
| Kuh, D., Richards, M., Hardy, R., Butterworth, S., & Wadsworth, M. E. (2004). Childhood cognitive ability and deaths up until middle age: a post-war birth cohort study. International Journal of Epidemiology, 33(2), 408-413. | ||
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measures in NSHD
- Overview of childhood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.