The 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 42 sweep using the Applied Psychology Unit (APU) Vocabulary Test.
Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.
| Domain: | Verbal (vocabulary) |
| Measures: | Vocabulary |
| Meaning of words | |
| Word knowledge | |
| CHC: | Gc (Crystallised ability) |
| Administrative method: | Timed conditions; CAPI and paper |
| Procedure: | There were 20 words in the test. Each word was followed by a multiple-choice list of 5 words from which the respondent picked the word with the same meaning as the original word. The test got progressively harder. |
| Duration: 4 minutes | |
| Link to questionnaire: | https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BCS70_Mainstage_FULL_QUESTIONNAIRE_final.pdf (opens in new tab) |
| Scoring: | 20 items; 1 point for each correct response, 0 for incorrect or not attempted |
| Item-level variable(s): | B9VQ1A - B9VSQ20 |
| Total score/derived variable(s): | B9VSCORE |
| B9VSCORB (banded variable) | |
| Age of CM (months): | Mean = 509.35, SD = 2.76, Range = 500 - 517 |
| Descriptives: | Raw score |
| N = 9,433 | |
| Range = 0 - 20 | |
| Mean = 12.60 | |
| SD = 3.71 | |
(click image to enlarge) |
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| Other sweep and/or cohort: | BCS70 – Age 16 – APU Vocabulary Test (original version - 75 items) |
| MCS – Age 14 – APU Vocabulary Test (shortened version - 20 items) | |
| Source: | Shortened version (20 of original 75 items) of Closs, S. J. (1976). APU vocabulary test (multiple choice format, 1986). Kent: Hodder and Stoughton Educational Ltd. |
| Technical resources: | Levy P & Goldstein H. (1984). Tests in Education: a book of critical reviews. London: Academic Press. |
| Reference examples: | Sullivan, A. & Brown, M. (2015). Vocabulary from adolescence to middle age. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies 6(2), 173-89. |
| Cheng, H., & Furnham, A. (2019). Correlates of Adult Vocabulary Task Performance: Findings from a British Cohort. Journal of Intelligence, 7(1), 2. |
For the named items in the table above, links are provided (where applicable) to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery. Where a variable range is provided, full variable lists can be accessed through the ‘Variable Groups’ tab on the linked Discovery page.
Go to:
- Overview of all cognitive measure in BCS70
- Overview of adulthood cognitive measures across all studies
This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.