Development of a Shortened Version of the Spatial Hearing Questionnaire (SHQ-S) for Screening Spatial-Hearing Ability

The Spatial Hearing Questionnaire (SHQ) was developed to address how to measure spatial-hearing ability in complex listening situations (Tyler, Perreau, & Ji, 2009). It has been translated and validated into various languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, and Persian. Although the SHQ contains only 24 items, it could be time-consuming in a busy clinic to administer. The purposes of this study were to develop and validate a shortened version of the SHQ (SHQ-S) and to compare self-perceived spatial-hearing ability across adults with normal hearing (NH), hearing loss (HL), and cochlear implants (CIs).

This was a retrospective study. The full version of the SHQ was administered to measure self-perceived spatial-hearing ability for 51 adults with NH at Augustana College, 47 adults with essentially mild to moderately severe sensorineural HL at Illinois State University, and 72 adult CI users at the University of Iowa. Exploratory factor analysis was performed for the full version for the data collected from adults with NH and HL. Appropriate items were chosen to develop the SHQ-S from the results of the exploratory factor analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis was then applied to test the factor structure of the SHQ-S for all participants. One-way analysis of variance was used to compare the self-perceived spatial-hearing performance scores between the 3 groups.

The exploratory factor analysis revealed scores loaded on 2 factors. Six items from the full version were chosen accordingly. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis indicated that that a shortened version of 6 items is sufficient to measure spatial-hearing ability. The internal consistency reliability of the SHQ-S was high. The main effect of the one-way analysis of variance was significant for the groups, F(2, 167) = 36.0, p < .0001. The comparisons with the Tukey adjustment indicated that the NH group reported significantly better spatial-hearing ability than either the HL or the CI group (both adjusted p values < .05). There was no significant difference between the participants with HL and CI users.

The psychometric characteristics of the 6-item SHQ-S were similar to those of the full version of the SHQ. We conclude that the SHQ-S is a reliable and valid tool for measuring spatial-hearing ability and screening for spatial-hearing difficulties. Participants with NH reported better spatial-hearing ability than those with HL or with CIs, whereas the CI users and participants with HL perceived similar spatial-hearing ability in the present study.