Development of a questionnaire to assess listening difficulties in adults with auditory processing disorder

Abstract

Purpose: There are many requirements to assess and support individuals with auditory processing disorder (APD); however, there are a few questionnaires that can be employed to detect the listening difficulties experienced by adults who are suspected to have APD. In the present study, we developed a questionnaire to assess the specific listening difficulties of adults and examined the possibility of standardizing this questionnaire in clinical situations.

Method: This study included 164 APD adults who had normal hearing, but who complained about listening difficulties encountered during everyday life, and 70 adults who had normal hearing and no complaints about listening difficulties during everyday life. We added four items of the psychological domain to the shortened versions of the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ-12) for the purpose of assessing the psychological and social reactions to listening difficulties, and we administered it to subjects.

Results: The results demonstrated that the questionnaire was a highly sensitive and specific approach and that it was useful in assessing adults with and without APD. This tendency especially increased by combining questions from the SSQ-12 with the psychological domain questions.

Conclusion: We suggest that the questionnaire would be used to screen patients in clinical situations and that the results would provide useful information that can aid in understanding the auditory characteristics of people with APD.

Keywords:

• Word
• auditory processing disorder
• questionnaire for listening difficulties
• Speech
• Spatial
• and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ)

Disclosure statement

The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS Grants-in-Aids for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) Grant no. 17K04946.