Discriminant Validity of the Parent-Proxy Preschool HEAR-QL

The parent-proxy Preschool HEAR-QL (Hearing Environments And Reflections on Quality of Life) is a quality of life (QOL) measure for 2 to 6-year-old children with hearing loss (HL). We compared Preschool HEAR-QL scores for children with HL and children with normal hearing (NH) to examine the measure's discriminant validity.

Cross-sectional study.

Three tertiary care pediatric otolaryngology clinics.

Two hundred forty-eight parents of children 2 to 6 years old with NH or HL participated.

None.

The Preschool HEAR-QL has five domains: Behavior and Attention, Hearing Environments, New Social Situations, Social Interactions, and Communications. Scores range from 0 to 100; higher scores indicate higher QOL. Scores for children with NH and with HL were compared using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curves.

Total HEAR-QL mean (SD) scores were higher for children with NH compared to children with HL (75.7 [10.5] vs. 67.5 [15.5], p < 0.001). Scores were not significantly different between children with unilateral and bilateral HL. Children 2 to 4 years old received lower Communications-domain scores than children 4 to 6 years old across all children (63.7 [25.4] vs. 74.1 [24.3], p = 0.01) and within the HL cohort (61.3 [25.1] vs. 72.6 [25.3]; p = 0.009). The Hearing Environments domain displayed excellent discrimination (AUROC = 0.858); other domains showed little to no discrimination.

The Hearing Environments-domain of the Preschool HEAR-QL differentiated between children with and without HL. Children with NH had higher scores than children with HL on both Total HEAR-QL and Hearing Environment-domain scores.