SURVEY BEHAVIOR AND COGNITION ACROSS THE LIFE COURSE: EVIDENCE FROM THE PANEL STUDY OF INCOME DYNAMICS

Cognitive abilities across adulthood are important pre-cursors to dementia. The primary way to capture cognitive abilities is via expensive and time-consuming standardized cognitive tests. We explore the extent to which cognition can be inferred from indicators of survey response behavior (SRB), such as the time to complete a questionnaire and the incidence of contradictory responses. We use nationally representative data from a mixed-mode supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics collected in 2016. This Wellbeing and Daily Life supplement includes rich cognitive data capturing both verbal and quantitative reasoning, and paradata from the supplement (e.g., time to complete). We assess the ability of survey response behavior to improve prediction of cognitive ability after accounting for standard sociodemographic variables typically available in surveys. We explore this from age 30 and across the life course. We find that SRB measures provide modest but consistent explanatory power across a wide range of ages. The explanatory power of SRB measures in our data is less than that of education, except at the oldest ages. SRB measures contain useful additional information, but models that include basic demographics, education and SRB measures leave much of the variation in cognitive ability unexplained. Which SRB measures best predict cognitive ability is consistent across cognitive measure but differs by age. Errors (i.e., contradictory responses) and response times are the best predictors at working ages but skips and backups are more predictive at older ages.