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Shipley, W. C. (1991). Shipley Institute of Living Scale. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services. $105 for 100 test forms, 1 manual, 1 hand-scoring key, and 2 WPS AutoScore test forms.
PURPOSE AND NATURE OF TEST
The Shipley Institute of Living Scale (SILS) was designed to provide a quick assessment of intellectual ability and cognitive impairment for adolescents and adults in educational and clinical settings. In its 2002 catalog, the publisher (Western Psychological Services) claims that the SILS has been used with millions of examinees during the past 60 years. The immense popularity of the SILS can be explained by a number of features, including brevity, self-administration, the paper-and-pencil format, easy scoring, appealing rationale, and perceived clinical utility.
The author of the SILS, Walter C. Shipley, developed the test in the late 1930s as a self-administering measure of intellectual impairment. Dr. Shipley received his PhD from Yale University in 1933. From 1938 to 1941 he was a research associate at the Hartford (Connecticut) Retreat, where he constructed the SILS. Dr. Shipley spent the remainder of his career at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. He died in 1966.
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
The SILS consists of two subtests that each require 10 minutes or less for completion. The Vocabulary subtest contains 40 words and is in a multiple-choice format. The respondent chooses from four alternatives the word that means the same as the target word. The Abstraction subtest consists of 20 series of letters, numbers, or words and is in a completion format. The examinee finishes the logical sequence by filling in a few blanks.
Six summary scores are generated from the SILS: (a) a Vocabulary score; (b) an Abstraction score; (c) a Total score; (d) a Conceptual Quotient (CQ), which is the original index of impairment; (e) an Abstraction Quotient (AQ), which is the CQ adjusted for the age and educational level of the examinee; and (f) an estimated IQ score based on either the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS; Wechsler, 1955) or the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R; Wechsler, 1981).
The Vocabulary, Abstraction, and Total raw scores are converted to standard scores using a sample of psychiatric patients grouped into 11 age categories. The manual explains that the standardization sample is typical of the client population...