Dissertation
Development of an Everyday Planning Measure: The Overnight Trip Task
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2022
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000004598
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/124764
Abstract
Introduction: Clinical neuropsychologists are often asked to assess the everyday functional abilities of their patients. Currently, the traditional measures of cognitive abilities most used by neuropsychologists are low in ecological validity and only capture a small proportion of variance of a person’s true functional capacity. While there have been some attempts to develop more ecologically valid measures of functional ability, the formats of these tasks are often too demanding, impractical, or infeasible to administer in a clinical setting. The current study details the development of a practical and portable measure of everyday planning, the Overnight Trip Task (OTT). Method: Fifty community dwelling older adults participated in two, 3-hour sessions through video conferencing (Zoom). Participants completed a battery of cognitive assessments and two formats of the OTT: the clinic OTT (paper-and-pencil) and parallel task, RW-OTT (real-world performance). Both formats required participants to plan for what they would pack and prepare for a hypothetical overnight trip based on a provided story. Embedded in the story are irrelevant information, rules, and contingencies that influence items and preparation needed for the trip. Results: The clinic OTT demonstrated a moderate relationship with the RW-OTT (r = .49) and no relationship with biological sex, learning, or long delay recall (r = -.03 to - .09), as well as two measures of executive functioning (set shifting, r = .26, verbal fluency, r = .13). Additionally, no significant relationships were found between the clinic OTT and another measure of everyday planning (r = .21). However, the RW-OTT was moderately correlated with the additional everyday planning measure (r = .35). Finally, neither the clinic OTT nor RW-OTT were able to account for incremental variance over and above executive functions or global cognition in a composite measure of everyday functioning. Discussion: The OTT was able to demonstrate good ecological and discriminate validity. However, there was no support for convergent or incremental validity. As typical clinical outcome measures of everyday functioning may not offer the most accurate representation of true real-world functioning, new methodologies may be needed to better establish the predictive validity of neuropsychological tests.
Metrics
6 File views/ downloads
22 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Development of an Everyday Planning Measure
- Creators
- Katelyn Brown
- Contributors
- Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe (Advisor)Carrie Cuttler (Committee Member)Walter Scott (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Psychology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 57
- Identifiers
- OCLC#: 1363848264; 99900898939801842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation