Are our Norms “Normal”? A 4-Year Follow-Up Study of a Biracial Sample of Rural Elders With Low Education

Abstract

Conventional norms that test presumably normal elderly individuals at one point in time may include preclinical cases of dementia and therefore may be less sensitive to the presence of dementia (Sliwinski, Lipton, Buschke, & Stewart, 1996). A sample of presumably normal African American and White rural community older adults (first reported in Marcopulos, McLain, & Giuliano, 1997) were retested after approximately 4 years to develop “robust” norms for the Mini Mental State Examination, Mattis Dementia Rating Scale Fuld Object Memory Evaluation, WAIS-R Vocabulary and Block Design, Wechsler Memory Scale – Revised Logical Memory and Visual Reproduction, Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices, and Clock Drawing Test. Ninety-four out of the original 133 participants were located and agreed to be retested. Twelve of the participants retested at Time 2 showed significant decline on testing relative to their own baseline and were dropped from the recalculated norms. Participants who declined on testing tended to be...