Clinical assessment of organizational strategy: An examination of healthy adults.

Abstract

During the assessment of patients with cognitive difficulties, clinicians often examine strategic processing, particularly the ability to use organization-based strategies to efficiently complete various tasks. Several commonly used neuropsychological tasks are currently thought to provide measures of organizational strategic processing, but empirical evidence for the construct validity of these strategic measures is needed before interpreting them as measuring the same underlying ability. This is particularly important for the assessment of organizational strategic processing because the measures span cognitive domains (e.g., memory strategy, language strategy) as well as types of organization. In the present study, 200 adults were administered cognitive tasks commonly used in clinical practice to assess organizational strategic processing. Factor analysis was used to examine whether these measures of organizational strategic processing, which involved different cognitive domains and types of organization, could be operationalized as measuring a unitary construct. A very good-fitting model of the data demonstrated no significant shared variance among any of the strategic variables from different tasks (root mean square error of approximation < .0001, standardized root-mean-square residual = .045, comparative fit index = 1.000). These findings suggest that organizational strategic processing is highly specific to the demands and goals of individual tasks even when tasks share commonalities such as involving the same cognitive domain. In the design of neuropsychological batteries involving the assessment of organizational strategic processing, it is recommended that various strategic measures across cognitive domains and types of organizational processing are selected as guided by each patient's individual cognitive difficulties.