Generalizability of the Swedish WISC-V to the Finland-Swedish minority - the FinSwed study.

International guidelines highlight the importance of using appropriate and culturally fair test materials when conducting clinical psychological assessments. In the present study, the generalizability of the Swedish WISC-V with Scandinavian normative data was explored in 6-16-year-old Swedish-speaking children in Finland (N = 134), as no local test versions or norms are available for this minority. First, metric measurement invariance was established, i.e., the constructs measured were equivalent between the standardization data and the present sample. Second, the performance of this minority group on the Swedish WISC-V was compared to the Scandinavian normative mean. The findings showed that the Finland-Swedish children performed overall higher than the normative mean on the Swedish WISC-V, with an FSIQ of 103. The performance was significantly higher also in the indexes VSI, FRI, and WMI as well as in several subtests. However, in the subtest Vocabulary, the Finland-Swedish children achieved significantly lower scores than the Scandinavian mean. Further analyses showed significant associations between cognitive performance and age as well as parental education. For the VCI and the FSIQ, performance increased significantly with age, despite the use of age-standardized scaled scores. The general high performance was suggested to relate to the overall high educational level of the Finland-Swedes as well as to other cultural and test-related factors. The results have implications for clinicians conducting assessments with this minority, but also highlight the importance of establishing test fairness by validating tests when used in different cultural groups.

A comparison of WPPSI-IV performance between Finland-Swedish minority children and the Scandinavian test norms: Findings from The FinSwed Study.

OBJECTIVE: The Swedish Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-IV) is commonly used for assessing young children belonging to the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland (Finland-Swedes), but there is no information about the generalizability of this test and its norms to this minority. Cross-cultural comparisons of WPPSI-IV are also scarce. We compared the performance of Finland-Swedish children to the Scandinavian norms of the Swedish WPPSI-IV and explored the relationship between sociodemographic factors (age, sex, parental education level, bilingualism) and the performance. METHOD: The Swedish WPPSI-IV was administered to 79 typically developing 5-6-year-old Finland-Swedish children assessed for The FinSwed Study. Their performance was compared to the Scandinavian norms using MANOVA, t-test, and confidence interval comparisons. Associations with sociodemographic variables were explored using regression analyses. RESULTS: Finland-Swedish children performed, on average, 1/3 SD higher than the Scandinavian norms, a difference which was statistically significant with medium-sized effects. However, individual subtests and indexes did not differ significantly from the norms. Significant associations with sociodemographic factors were found for some but not all index scores. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides clinically important information for using the Swedish WPPSI-IV with the Finland-Swedish minority and demonstrates aspects that clinicians working with this minority should take into account. The results are presumably partly explained by characteristics of the present sample, and partly by cultural and linguistic differences between the Finland-Swedish population and the Scandinavian countries. The findings also illustrate that cross-cultural differences in cognitive performance may be present even between similar cultures with the same language.

WPPSI-IV and NEPSY-II performance in mono- and bilingual 5-6-year-old children: Findings from The FinSwed Study.

Children's language background relates to their neurocognitive development. Knowledge of this relationship is important as bilingualism is common. However, research regarding language background in relation to performance on cognitive tests such as the WPPSI-IV and NEPSY-II is scarce. The present study compared WPPSI-IV and NEPSY-II performances between 5- and 6-year-old Swedish-speaking monolingual (n = 45) and Swedish-Finnish-speaking simultaneous bilingual (n = 34) children in Finland. The participants were gathered by stratified sampling and were assessed with the Swedish versions of the tests. In profile analyses, a significant monolingual advantage was found in some WPPSI-IV subtests and indexes requiring expressive vocabulary (Vocabulary, Similarities, Picture Naming, and Vocabulary Acquisition Index) and visuospatial skills (Object Assembly and Visual Spatial Index). No group differences were found between mono- and bilingual children in receptive language, visual memory, or fluid intelligence. Additionally, no differences were found on the Full Scale IQ. The performance on the WPPSI-IV Similarities subtest improved in a subgroup of bilinguals when answers in both Swedish and Finnish were accounted for, instead of accepting only answers in Swedish. No significant differences were found between mono- and bilinguals on the language and memory tasks of NEPSY-II. These findings highlight the importance of considering the child's language background when assessing expressive language in young children, as well as the benefits of assessing bilinguals in both of their languages.

Comparison of WPPSI-IV and WISC-V cognitive profiles in 6-7-year-old Finland-Swedish children - findings from the FinSwed study.

The Wechsler scales are among the most widely used tests in cognitive and neuropsychological assessments. When assessing children aged 6:0-7:7 years the clinician can choose between Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence - Fourth Edition (WPPSI-IV) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Fifth Edition (WISC-V). Information about how the tests function and differ in this overlapping age range is limited. Using a between-subjects design, the present study compared the cognitive profiles of typically developing Swedish-speaking children in Finland in this overlapping age range (6:1 - 7:2 years), assessed with the Swedish versions of either WPPSI-IV (n = 38) or WISC-V (n = 24). Profile analyses and one-way ANCOVA were performed to investigate differences in the comparable subtests, indexes and Full Scale IQ. On the subtest level, children assessed with WISC-V had significantly lower scores on the subtests Vocabulary, Matrix Reasoning, and Bug/Symbol Search compared to children assessed with WPPSI-IV. On the index level, scores for the Verbal Comprehension Index and the Fluid Reasoning Index were significantly lower for children assessed with WISC-V. The Full Scale IQ was significantly lower on WISC-V. Taken together, the findings indicate that WPPSI-IV and WISC-V produce partly different cognitive profiles. These differences are important to recognize when choosing which test to use and when interpreting the results of clinical assessments of children in this age group.