Abstract
The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) is a commonly administered battery for assessing intellectual and cognitive abilities. Despite its popularity, construct validation studies primarily utilize the WAIS-IV normative sample rather than ecologically-valid clinical samples. The current study expands the literature on the validity of WAIS-IV by testing a bifactor model in such a sample. We examined archival data from 300 concurrent psychological evaluations performed at a university-based community clinic. Participants received the full WAIS-IV standard battery. Consistent with recent literature, confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) favored a direct hierarchical model, where the g factor has a direct influence on WAIS-IV subtest performance and index scores explain only modest degrees of residual variance. Results challenge traditional intelligence nosologies and suggest consideration of a two-step method of WAIS-IV interpretation in clinical samples, whereby the Full Scale IQ score (FSIQ) score is examined first and individual subtest scores are analyzed second.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.