Cross-validation of six short forms of the WAIS-R in a healthy geriatric sample

A number of methods have been developed in recent years to estimate full-scale IQ scores from abbreviated versions of the revised Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-R), including Silverstein's (1982) two- and four-subtest short forms, Reynolds, Willson, and Clark's (1983) four-subtest short form, and Brooker and Cyr's (1986) two-, three- and four-subtest short forms. Short forms are of particular interest to the clinician and researcher who need a brief screening scale of cognitive abilities for the elderly, but their effectiveness with a normal aging sample has not been established. The present study examines the accuracy of six methods of estimating full-scale IQs from abbreviated versions of the WAIS-R in a middle-aged to elderly nonpsychiatric sample of 28 healthy males. Although all six methods were found to yield scores that were correlated highly with full scale scores, the method of Reynolds et al. (1983) resulted in short-form IQ estimates that were significantly different statistically from full-scale IQ scores. Although most of the six short-form methods appear to be useful screening measures for cognitive functioning and longitudinal changes in intellectual functions in the elderly, their use for classification purposes is not supported in the present study.