Reliability of a Novel Social Activity Questionnaire: Perceived Social Support and Verbal Interaction in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention.

OBJECTIVE Social activity is associated with healthy aging and preserved cognition. Such activity includes a confluence of social support and verbal interaction, each influencing cognition through rarely parsed, mechanistically distinct pathways. We created a novel verbal interaction measure for the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention (WRAP) and assessed reliability of resultant data, a first step toward mechanism-driven examination of social activity as a modifiable predictor of cognitive health. METHOD Two WRAP subsamples completed a test-retest study to determine 8-week stability ( n = 107) and 2-year stability ( n = 136) of verbal interaction, and 2-year stability of perceived social support. Reliability was determined using quadratic-weighted kappa, percent agreement, or correlation coefficients. RESULTS Reliability was fair to almost perfect. The association between social support and interaction quantity decreased with age. DISCUSSION Social activity data demonstrate moderate to excellent temporal stability. Moreover, in older individuals, social support and verbal interaction represent two distinct dimensions of social activity.