"Testing cognitive abilities by telephone in a sample of 6- to 8-year-olds" (2002)
Abstract
Telephone-administered measures of cognitive ability have been shown to be efficient and cost-effective alternatives to in-person-based assessments. The current study examined the validity of a telephone-assessed measure of cognitive ability using a sample of fifty-two 6–8-year-old children. The telephone test was composed of verbal- as well as performance-based measures of cognitive ability. The telephone-assessed measure of general cognitive ability correlated r=.65 with in-person-assessed measures. After correction for range restriction, the correlation was r=.72. Thus, measures of cognitive ability administered by telephone appear to be feasible, even in elementary school-age children.
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About IQ measurement:
Alan S. Kaufman, clinical professor of psychology at the Yale University School of Medicine:Now I'm wondering how much do the errors pile up. I need to read the papers carefully to see if they indeed say, "what we have measured is "g" +/- 4%.
There's no such thing as "an" IQ. You have an IQ at a given point in time. That IQ has built-in error. It's not like stepping on a scale to determine how much you weigh.
The reasonable error around any reliable IQ is going to be plus or minus 5 or 6 points, to give you a 95 percent confidence interval. So, for example, if a person scores 126, then you can say with 95 percent confidence that the person's true IQ is somewhere between 120 and 132; within our science we don't get any more accurate than that.
But as soon as you go to a different IQ test, then the range is even wider, because different IQ tests measure slightly different things.
But while there is no single IQ – it's a range of IQs – you can still pretty much determine whether a person is going to score roughly at a low level, or an average level, or a high level.
However, IQ is a relative concept. IQ is how well you do on an IQ test compared to other people your age, and that is true whether you are 4 or in your 40s.
PS: another annoying thing about these papers is that they are all about the variance - they do not mention the value of the mean. I for one, can think of possible anomalies that would be made visible by the mean.