Obtaining comparable measurement of midlife cognitive functioning from disparate cognitive tasks

National surveys of health and aging increasingly collect data via multiple modes, including via face-to-face, phone, and the web. However, mode effects-differences in measurement due to how the data are collected, rather than to underlying differences in cognition-undermine comparability in performance for different segments of samples, impeding analysis of cognitive function in the full sample. This article reports on the construction and evaluation of a measure of general cognitive functioning comparable across diverse phone and web cognitive tasks for the 2021 follow-up of the High School and Beyond Study of 1980, a nationally representative survey of individuals who were U.S. high school sophomores and seniors in 1980.

We used a hierarchical explanatory item response theory model to equate general cognition scores across phone and web samples based on the relationship between midlife cognition and covariates from midlife and high school.

The full model replicated task scores from unidimensional models, and the explanatory component of the model did not bias general cognition scores, indicating that the model was a faithful representation of patterns of cognitive task performance. We found no evidence of a violation of our assumption of the independence of regression coefficients and survey mode.

This article provides an empirical example of how to construct a psychometrically sound cross-mode cognitive score from data collected through multiple modes. Given the increasing demand for cost-effective large-scale survey design, our method may find greater application in other nationally representative aging studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).