Validity and reliability of the Persian version of spatial hearing questionnaire

Our hearing ability in space is critical for hearing speech in noisy environment and localization. The Spatial Hearing Questionnaire (SHQ) has been devised to focus only on spatial haring tasks (e.g., lateralization, distance detection and binaural detection). The aim of the present study was to determine the reliability and validity of the Persian translation of the SHQ (Spatial Hearing Questionnaire).

Translation and back-translation, reliability, content and construct validity were investigated. Eighty patients with sensory neural hearing loss (SNHL) (52.50% female and 47.5 % male) with the mean±SD age of 49.02±13.60 years completed SHQ, and they were categorized into mild, moderate, moderate to severe and severe groups based on their hearing threshold. Inclusion criteria in this study were the MMSE questionnaire score of higher than 21, good general health, no history of psychiatric disorders, dizziness or vertigo, dementia or alcohol abuse.

The reliability was assessed by Cronbach's alpha and found to be 0.99. Item-total correlation was between r= 0.84 and 0.92. There was a significant difference between the mean score of PSHQ in the four groups. Based on the factor analysis, two factors were extracted from the questions in P-SHQ: sound localization; and music and speech understanding in noise and quiet. These factors could explain 82.1% and 9.3% of the total variance, respectively.

The present study proved the reliability and validity of the Persian version of SHQ (PSHQ). This provides a suitable tool for spatial hearing assessment in clinical/research environments.