A brief report on WAIS-R normative data collection in Mayo's Older African Americans Normative Studies

Historically, neuropsychological measures such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) have yielded unacceptably high rates of misdiagnosis of impairment among cognitively normal African Americans, primarily due to poor test specificity and inadequate representation of ethnic minorities in the normative sample. In this report, we briefly review these issues and describe efforts by investigators in Mayo's Older African Americans Normative Studies (MOAANS) to develop more appropriate norms for African American elders on the WAIS-R. During MOAANS data collection, the third edition of the WAIS (WAIS-III) was introduced with updated representation of ethnic minorities in the normative database. More recently, specific demographic corrections for African Americans have been derived for WAIS-III subtest scores and indices. As such, WAIS-R normative estimates are not presented here. Interested readers who wish to obtain a full set of MOAANS WAIS-R norms, however, are invited to contact the authors for these data.