Public Events Questionnaire

The Public Events Questionnaire (PEQ; Noone et al., 2014) was developed to be an easily-updated measure of participants' memory for events that occurred within 16 years of the test's administration. It was split into four time-periods, one pertaining to the most recent 12 months (Events Questionnaire time-period 1 - EQ1) and three covering the 15 years before that, divided into three groups of 5-year blocks (EQ5, EQ10, and EQ15). Each time-period was made up of 15 questions covering three public events categories: National news events, International news events, and Cultural events (including arts, sports, and entertainment). This resulted in a total of 60 items for the entire questionnaire. The first version of the questionnaire contained 9 national questions, 23 international questions, and 28 cultural questions. The PEQ was modified to 20 questions per category overall for Versions 2 and 3 with five questions per category within each time period. A pool of questions was sourced from internet news websites for each update of the questionnaire. Prospective questions were discussed at research team meetings and chosen for inclusion in the next questionnaire based on level of memorability (high) and duration of coverage of the event (brief). Questions were presented orally and participants were asked to recall the answer. If unsuccessful at one attempt to recall the answer, they were provided with four possible answers. Correctly recalled items were scored two points, correctly recognized items scored one point and incorrect items scored zero points. Internal consistency, parallel-form reliability, test-retest reliability, and validity were confirmed in a sample of healthy participants followed-up over a long time-period. (APA PsycTests Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)