Skip to content
Closer - The home of longitudinal research

ALSPAC - Focus on Mothers 4 - Spot The Word

A study of ALSPAC study mothers began in 2008 with the aim of determining what factors are related to body size, bone density, blood pressure, glucose, insulin and abnormal blood lipids in women.

This “Focus on Mothers” study consisted of four clinics held during the following periods:

  1. 2008 – 2011 (FOM1)
  2. 2011 – 2013 (FOM2)
  3. 2013 – 2014 (FOM3)
  4. 2014 – 2015 (FOM4)

Each clinic lasted approximately 2.5 hours. For further details see (Fraser et al., 2013).

Along with various physical measures, measures of cognitive ability/functioning were collected at clinics FOM2, FOM3, and FOM4.

Details on the Spot The Word measure administered as part of FOM4 are outlined in the table below.

Years of data collection: 2014-2015
Domain: Reading ability
Measures: Reading comprehension
Reading decoding
CHC: Grw (Reading/Writing)
CLOSER Source: Explore this sweep in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Early Adulthood (19 years – 30 years 11 months) (opens in a new tab)
Administration method: Trained interviewer; face to face; clinical setting; pen and paper task
Procedure: The participant was presented with a list of word-pairs. Each pair consisted of a real word, and a non-word. Participants were instructed to work through the pairs, placing a tick beside the real word in each pair. The participant was given a practice list before the real trial. If the participant spent too long deliberating over a pair, they were prompted to guess.
Link to questionnaire: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring: One point for each correct item
Item-level variable(s): Not readily available
Total score/derived variable(s): fm4cg012
Explore these variables in CLOSER Discovery: ALSPAC Focus on Mothers 4 Clinic Dataset (opens in a new tab)
Descriptives: Raw score
N = 2,842
Range = 4 – 60
Mean = 44.03
SD = 7.51
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants (years): Mean = 53.13 years, SD = 4.43, Range = 40 – 67
Other sweep and/or cohort: ALSPAC – Focus on Mothers 2 – Spot The Word
ALSPAC – Focus on Mothers 3 – Spot The Word
Source: Baddeley, A., Emslie, H., & Nimmo-Smith, I. (1993). The Spot-the-Word test: A robust estimate of verbal intelligence based on lexical decision. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 32(1), 55-65.
Technical resources: None
Example articles: Anderson, E. L., Heron, J., Ben-Shlomo, Y., Kuh, D., Cooper, R., Lawlor, D. A., … & Howe, L. D. (2017). Adversity in childhood and measures of aging in midlife: Findings from a cohort of British women. Psychology and Aging, 32(6), 521-530.

For the named items in the table above, links are provided to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery.

In this section

ALSPAC Focus on Mothers 4 Spot The Word