African American acculturation and neuropsychological test performance following traumatic brain injury

The present study examined the influence of African American acculturation on the performance of neuropsychological tests following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Seventy one participants already enrolled in a larger-scale study assessing the impact of TBI (i.e., the South Eastern Michigan Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems project) completed a self-report measure of African American acculturation (African American Acculturation Scale-Short Form; Landrine & Klonoff, 1995) in addition to a standardized battery of neuropsychological tests. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the relationship between level of acculturation and test performance after controlling for injury-related (initial Glasgow Coma Scale score, time since injury) and demographic variables (age, sex, years of education, and socioeconomic status). Lower levels of acculturation were associated with significantly poorer performances on the Galveston Orientation & Amnesia Test, MAE Tokens test, WAIS-R Block Design, Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, and Symbol Digit Modalities Test. Decreased levels of acculturation were also significantly related to lower scores on a composite indicator of overall neuropsychological test performance. In addition, the examiner's ethnicity (Black or White) was related with scores on a few of the tests (i.e., Block Design, Trail Making Test), but was not significantly associated with the overall neuropsychological test performance. Overall, these findings suggest that differences in cultural experience may be an important factor in the neuropsychological assessment of African Americans following TBI, and provide additional support for the hypothesis that cultural factors may partially account for the differences among ethnic/cultural groups on neuropsychological tests.