Wisconsin Study:Tracking the Life Course (RMI)

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal is part of a larger project that analyzes assessments of cognitive functioning in survey interviews to describe the interactional dimensions of what we often think of as "cognitive" processing or functioning. We examine how the interaction between the interviewer and respondent contributes to the outcomes of cognitive assessments, analyze how respondents may use social, interactional resources to compensate for possible cognitive deficits, seek interactional indicators of cognitive functioning, and identify features of the interaction that can be used to improve measurement in Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) surveys of older adults. The interactional data for the project are provided by an important and unique feature of the University of Wisconsin Center for the Demography of Aging and Health collaborative and multi-disciplinary program on aging and the life course. In its methodology, this program and the 2004 Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) telephone survey incorporates high quality digital voice recordings for thousands of interviews. The proposed project utilizes these recordings for studying and introducing methodological innovations. It is expected that the procedures and findings of this project will enrich and improve the research in other components of the WLS P01. In the proposed project, we are dealing with a central paradox in the interviewing of older adults with regard to their health and well-being. In terms of cognitive functioning, the assessment based on a survey answer may depend on interaction that is itself influenced by that functioning. In order to understand the relation between interaction and cognition, and to improve the measurement of cognition, we are studying the relationship between cognitive and interactional skills, seeking to identify behavioral correlates that could enhance the quality of measurements of cognitive functioning in current and future studies. We integrate the qualitative methods of Conversation Analysis with the quantitative approach of interaction coding, an integration that presents strong possibilities for cross validation of both qualitative and quantitative findings. Our project goes step-by-step, first identifying interactional phenomena related to cognition, then using these phenomena to apply and test interaction codes, and finally modeling and quantitatively testing the relation between interaction and cognition.