Amplification performance outcome: a self-assessment outcome measure for hearing aid users in Greece

Abstract

Purpose: The aim of this study was the development of a simple instrument, in order to be established as a self-assessment tool, about the benefits from amplification systems in Greece. This instrument is called the Amplification Performance Outcome or APO.

Method: The current scale is comprised of 6 subscales addressing different domains with a total of 30 items. A five-point Likert scale was used to capture data. The complete APO typically requires 18 min or less to complete with each subscale requiring less than 3 min. It was evaluated on 100 hearing aid users, ages between 23 and 88 years old, with mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss bilaterally. Data from 62 subjects were used to examine the test–retest properties of the instrument. All the participants were users of amplification with unilateral or bilateral fitting for about 4–12 weeks.

Results: The overall mean scores (%) for positive, neutral and negative responses indicated a considerable overall benefit from hearing amplification. The positive responses occupy 73.6%, the negative responses occupy 15.9% and neutral responses occupy 10.5% of total responses. The psychometric properties of APO appear to be acceptable. The scale appears to have high face, content and convergent validity. Results also revealed high test–retest reliability and internal consistency.

Conclusion: These results reveal that the APO scale is a potentially valuable clinical instrument, and may help to provide more standardization to the hearing aid evaluation process. Future research will be needed to obtain multiple outcome measures from large numbers of individuals to determine whether this self-assessment scale would suffice.

Keywords:

• Amplification
• hearing loss
• self-assessment
• outcome measure

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to their subjects for their voluntary participation and their time in this experiment.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.