he purpose of this project was to develop a reliable and valid battery for the assessment of spatial orientation skills (SOS) in persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The battery, comprised of 13 subtests, was administered to 97 normal control subjects, 25 subjects with early AD and 10 with late AD. The test-retest reliability of the battery was based on the test results of 33 normal control subjects and 25 early AD subjects. Inter-rater reliability was determined using four trained raters who evaluated 27 normal control subjects and the same 25 early AD subjects. Content validity was established using a panel of six experts and construct validity was determined by comparing the performance of the normal control and early AD groups. To establish criterion validity, the Global Deterioration Scale (GDS) was used as the criterion. For the AD group, eight subtests demonstrated acceptable test-retest and inter-rater reliability coefficients (ICC... |