A validation and normative study of the Parents’ Evaluation of Aural/Oral Performance of Children plus (PEACH+) rating scale in Malaysia

Abstract

Objective

The purpose of the present study was to (1) translate and validate the PEACH + Rating Scale in Malay and (2) establish normative curves as a function of age and examine test-retest reliability for the Malay and English versions of PEACH+.

Design

This is a cross-sectional study that used a convenient sampling technique.

Study sample

One hundred and fifty-seven parents of typically developing children aged between 4 months and 7 years participated in the study. Forty-nine completed the Malay PEACH + in a pen-to-paper format (Aim 1). One hundred and eight parents completed PEACH + online (69 completed the Malay version and 39 the English version), and 20 of them completed the questionnaire twice (Aim 2).

Results

The PEACH + in Malay showed high internal consistency and item-total correlation. The normative data revealed that scores for frequency of auditory behaviour increased rapidly with age until about 20 months and reached an asymptote of around 90% by about 40 months of age. A similar trend was observed for ease of listening scores, which asymptoted around 85%.

Conclusions

The validated Malay PEACH + Rating Scale can be used as a guide to monitor auditory functional performance and listening efforts of Malaysian children in real-world environments.

Keywords:

• Normative data
• auditory behaviour
• listening effort
• reliability
• online survey
• multi-lingual

Acknowledgment

We are very grateful to all parents/caregivers for participating in this study. Many thanks to Sharifah Najhan Binti Syed Saffi who assisted in adapting the PEACH + Rating Scale into Malay.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the author(s).