The HHIE questionnaire (see Appendix 1) is constituted of 25 items, including 12 social/situational and 13 emotional difficulties to hearing impairments. For developing this self-report scale, at the first stage, the team of research explored what kinds of activities that elderly people were most likely to do and then they did some analysis to select the activities from those as the social/situational sub-items in the assessment. Secondly, the emotional sub-items were developed by asking a number of people with hearing impairment …show more content…
The results revealed the internal consistency in all sub-items. After that, they extended the size of participants to 100 and their mean age was 75 years old, and their hearing levels of the better ear were within from normal to severe for accessing the reliability of this assessment. The results demonstrated excellent internal consistency through the computation of Chronbach’s alpha for the total items as well as the emotional and social sub-items (a .88 to .95). In addition, another study by Weinstein, Spitzer, and Ventry in 1986, it was also evident that the HHIE had high test-retest reliability (r >.90) of the measurement in the elderly population. Therefore, this self-report assessment is reliable and valid for outcome …show more content…
In the PHAB, there are 66 items which are separated into 4 scales and three of them are further classified into 2 subscales, as revealed in Table 2, for recognizing the communication abilities and the sound perception in daily life. The participants need to respond how often they have experienced in each item from given 7 points scale (see Table 3) with hearing aids and without hearing aids. For developing the APHAB, the 24 items were selected from the 66 items in the PHAB for reducing the time of testing and also those items were allocated in 4 subscales, including ease of communication (EC), reverberation (RV), background noise (BN) and aversiveness (AV) ( Cox &Alexander,