Objective: To develop and evaluate a shortened version of the Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit, to be called the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit, or APHAB. Design: The Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (PHAB) is a 66-item self-assessment, disability-based inventory that can be used to document the outcome of a hearing aid fitting, to compare several fittings, or to evaluate the same fitting over time. Data from 128 completed PHABs were used to select items for the Abbreviated PHAB. AU subjects were elderly hearing-impaired who wore conventional analog hearing aids. Statistics of score distributions and psychometric properties of each of the APHAB subscales were determined. Data from 27 similar subjects were used to examine the test-retest properties of the instrument. Finally, equal-percentile profiles were generated for unaided, aided and benefit scores obtained from successful wearers of linear hearing aids. The APHAB uses a subset of 24 of the 66 items from the PHAB, scored in four 6-item subscales. Three of the subscales, Ease of Communication, Reverberation, and Background Noise address speech understanding in various everyday environments. The fourth subscale, Aversiveness of Sounds, quantifies negative reactions to environmental sounds. The APHAB typically requires 10 minutes or less to complete, and it produces scores for unaided and aided performance as well as hearing aid benefit. Test-retest correlation coefficients were found to be moderate to high and similar to those reported in the literature for other scales of similar content and length. Critical differences for each subscale taken individually were judged to be fairly large, however, smaller differences between two tests from the same individual can be significant if the three speech communication subscales are considered jointly. Conclusions: The APHAB is a potentially valuable clinical instrument. It can be useful for quantifying the disability associated with a hearing loss and the reduction of disability that is achieved with a hearing aid. (Ear & Hearing 1996;16176-186) In previous articles, we have reported the development of the Profile of Hearing Aid Performance The University of Memphis (R.M.C.) and Veterans AfFairs Medical Center (R.M.C., G.C.A.), Memphis, Tennessee ( P W ) and the Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (PHAB) (Cox, Alexander, & Gilmore, 1991a; Cox & Gilmore, 1990; Cox, Gilmore, & Alexander, 1991b; Cox & Rivera, 1992) . Both the PHAP and the PHAB are 66-item inventories that are completed by a hearing aid wearer. All of the items are statements about communication abilities or perception of sound in daily life situations, and the respondents' task is to indicate how frequently each statement is true. They are provided with a seven-point response scale as follows: always (99%), almost always (87%), generally (75%), half-the-time GO%), occasionally (25%), seldom (12%), never (1%). To complete the PHAB, each item is given two responses, one for "without my hearing aid" and one for "with my hearing aid." Thus, the PHAB measures both unaided and aided performance. In addition, a measure of benefit from the hearing aid is computed by subtracting the results for "with my hearing aid" from those for "without my hearing aid." In contrast, when the PHAP is used, all of the items relate to the situation when the hearing aid is worn. As a result, the P W measures aided performance only, not unaided experiences or hearing aid benefit. In effect, the PHAP is equivalent to the "with my hearing aid" portion of the PHAB. The 66 items used in the PHAB and the PHAP are divided into four scales and three of the scales are further divided into two subscales each. Scale SA (speech communication under relatively favorable conditions) is composed of subscales FT (Familiar Talkers) and EC (Ease of Communication). Scale SB (speech communication under unfavorable conditions that are not primarily due to background noise) comprises subscales RV (Reverberation) and RC (Reduced Cues). Scale SC (speech communication under unfavorable noisy conditions) is not further subdivided but is referred to as subscale BN (Background Noise) when discussed in the context of subscales. Scale ES (perception of Environmental Sounds) is composed of subscales AV (Aversiveness) and DS (Distortion)  Clinical applications of an APHAB might include: (a) prediction of likely success with amplification based on prefitting responses to the unaided portion; (b) comparison of aided performance of an individual with that of a reference group such as successful hearing aid wearers; or (c) documentation of benefit in various environments either for accountability purposes, to troubleshoot an unsuccessful fitting, or to compare the profit derived from different instruments or different programs in the same instrument. Based on these considerations, the APHAB was constructed with the following objectives in mind: 1. 3. It should have an overall structure of four content domains corresponding to the four scales in the parent inventory. Each domain should be represented by six test items. The items should be chosen based on consideration of scores obtained in each of the three response modes (aided performance, unaided performance, and benefit). Each six-item set should be chosen to maximize internal consistency reliability without making the items too similar in wording. It was determined at the outset that for the purposes of a clinical instrument three of the seven PHAB subscales (Familiar Talkers [FTI, Reduced Cues [RCI, and Distortion of Sounds [DSI) would be eliminated entirely. It was felt that due to the relatively easy listening situations assessed, aided and benefit scores for FT might sometimes be limited by a ceiling effect. Also, subscales RC and DS have been shown to have low internal consistency as well as lower test-retest correlations than the other subscales (Cox & Rivera, 1992). Items for the APHAB were selected based on an analysis of responses to the items of the remaining four PHAB subscales: Ease of Communication (EC), Reverberation (RV), Background Noise (BN), and Aversiveness (AV). The resulting abbreviated inventory comprises four subscales with each subscale named according to the subscale in the parent inventory from which the items were drawn. Thus, the APHAB subscales are also called Ease of Communication (EC), Reverberation (RV), Background Noise (BN), and Aversiveness (AV). The APHAB inventory yields scores for speech communication in favorable, reverberant, and noisy environments as well as a measure of the aversiveness of loud sounds. File data for hearing aid wearers who had completed the PHAB were used to select the items for the APHAB. All available first administrations uf the PHAB were used. There were 128 records: 90 men and 38 women. Their mean age was 68 and the age range was 30 to 87 yr. Audiometric and hearing aid fitting data were available for 88% of the subjects and these were thought to be representative of the entire group. Table 1 summarizes the extent of their hearing losses and the audiogram slopes. All subjects wore conventional, analog hearing aids. The fittings were: 42% binaural, 58% monaural, and 71% in-the-ear, 29% behind-the-ear instruments. Data on reported daily hearing aid use and duration of experience with amplification were available for a representative sample of 83% of the subjects. Table 2 reports these data. Overall, subject demographics indicate that individuals were typically elderly with mild-to-moderate sloping or flat hearing losses. The majority had at least 1 yr of hearing aid experience and wore their instrument(s) more than 4 hr per day. To select six items for the APHAB Background Noise subscale, item analyses were performed for responses to the 16 items in the PHAB Background Noise subscale. Separate analyses were generated for unaided, aided, and benefit scores. Corrected item-total correlations were examined for each item in each analysis. Items with the highest item-total correlations across all three analyses were selected for the APHAB provided that they were not too similar in wording to other selected items. The same procedure was followed to select the items for the three other APHAB subscales: Ease of Communication, Reverberation, and Aversiveness. Distributions and descriptive statistics were generated for each of the 24 selected items and for the four APHAB subscales that resulted. Next, test-retest reliability and critical differences for the APHAB were determined using the data from 27 of 28 subjects described by Cox and Rivera (1992), who completed the PHAB on three separate occasions. One subject was eliminated due to a change in selection criteria. The demographic characteristics of these subjects were reported in the previous article and were similar to those of the group used for item selection, described above. Finally, all of the known successful hearing aid users (defined as daily use of amplification for more than 4 hr for more than 1 yr) were culled from the subject group. This yielded 55 subjects. (Note that the term "successful hearing aid user" as applied here should not be interpreted as suggesting that the hearing aid user was satisfied with hisher amplification system. Rather, it means that the individual was judged to have made a successful adjustment to the use of amplification, whether or not he or she was satisfied with the help it provided.) Using the data from these subjects, equal-percentile profiles were determined for unaided, aided, and benefit scores on each APHAB subscale. Seven profiles were generated, representing the 5th, 20th, 35th, 50th, 65th, 80th, and 95th percentiles.  RESULTS AND DISCUSSION chosen based on item-total correlations for this particular sample of subjects, it would not be surprising if results from a different sample reveal some decrease in the internal reliability statistics. In the unaided response mode, three of the subscale distributions were significantly skewed. The negative skewness for subscales reflecting communication in unfavorable situations (Reverberation [RVI and Background Noise [BNI) shows that these subscales received mostly high scores (indicative of a high proportion of problems) but a few substantially lower scores. Similarly, the positive skewness in the subscale reflecting the aversiveness of sounds (AV) reveals that most individuals reported low sound aversiveness in unaided conditions but a few subjects reported relatively high aversiveness. It would be of interest to determine whether individuals who score in the tails of these skewed distributions are less likely to make a successful adjustment to hearing aid use. Some preliminary data on this question are reported below. Test-retest reliability is an important consideration for any instrument that might be used to determine rehabilitation strategies. As noted earlier, these types of data were available for a subset of 27 subjects who had responded to the 66 items of the PHAB on three separate occasions. These data were rescored using only the items chosen for the APHAB. To evaluate any systematic changes in response tendencies over time, a repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed on the data for the unaided response mode. Variables were subscale (Ease of Communication, Reverberation, Background Noise, and Aversiveness) and test occasion (first, second, and third). Mean overall scores for the first, second, and third tests were 56.2, 52.6, and 52.9, respectively. Thus, the result for the first test was about 3.5% higher than that for the two later tests. A difference of this size is probably too small to be of practical significance, and it did not quite achieve statistical significance at the 0.05 level (F[2, 521 = 3.04, p = 0.06). The interaction between subscale and test occasion was also nonsignificant. Similar ANOVAs were performed for the aided response mode and the benefit data. In both analyses, the main effect for test occasion and the two-way interaction were nonsignificant. Overall, these analyses did not provide evidence that there is any systematic tendency for APHAB scores to change across test occasions. Retest reliability for APHAB subscale scores was explored in two ways: via test-retest correlation coefficients for each subscale, and by constructing 90% and 95% critical difference values. Test-retest correlation coefficients can be viewed as providing information about the reliability of intersubject dif- ferences. Such correlations will be high if the ordering of individuals tends to remain constant across tests (e.g., the higher-scoring individuals on the first test also score relatively highly on subsequent tests). In clinical settings, this feature might be of limited interest. Critical difference values reflect the reliability of repeated scores from the same individual. The difference between two scores from the same person will exceed the 95% critical difference by chance alone (i.e., when the real difference in scores is zero) on only 5% of comparisons. Thus, critical differences are important in clinical practice because they can be used to evaluate differences between scores obtained under putatively different conditions (e.g., two different hearing aids). If the two scores differ by more than the 95% critical difference, it can be concluded with reasonable certainty that the difference was not due to chance and probably depicts real differences between the tested hearing aids. In view of the variability of individual data, a 90% critical difference might be considered sufficiently stringent in clinical applications since it yields a likelihood of drawing correct conclusions 9 times out of 10. Table 4 gives the APHAB test-retest correlations for unaided, aided, and benefit scores. For each type of score, correlations were computed between the first and second test administrations and between the second and third administrations. The two correlations for each score were then averaged. These are compared with previously published analogous correlations for the PHAP (Cox & Gilmore, 1990) and for the PHAB (Cox & Rivera, 1992) . Correlations for the unaided response condition, which have no counterpart in previous publications, range from a low of 0.65 for the Reverberation (RV) subscale to a high of 0.89 for the Aversiveness (AV) subscale. These moderate to high values compare EAR & HEARINGIAPRIL 1995 (1990) reveals that, for the Background Noise (BN) and Aversiveness (AV) subscales, retest correlations for the APHAB were less than those for the PHAP. While this result was probably partly due to sample differences, it was also expected because both of these subscales were markedly shortened for the APHAB and fewer items usually produce lower reliability. Correlations for the APHAB benefit subscales were also slightly lower overall than those computed for the longer PHAB subscales for the same subjects. The largest decrease was seen for the Background Noise (BN) subscale. In general, it appears that shortening the subscales resulted in a modest decrease in the reliability of intersubject differences. Table 5 depicts 90% and 95% critical differences for each APHAB subscale and response mode. Comparable critical differences from PHAP and PHAB subscales are also shown. There are several noteworthy aspects of these data. First, let us consider only the aided and unaided response modes. The three subscales that reflect speech communication in various environments (Ease of Communication, Reverberation, and Background Noise) have rather similar critical differences in both modes. This indicates that hearing aid wearers judge the intelligibility of amplified speech just as consistently as they do unamplified speech. In addition, the consistency of judgments is not affected by the acoustic environment under consideration. For the sake of simplicity in clinical applications, it would be reasonable to adopt a single value for interpretation of aided or unaided score differences for the Ease of Communication, Reverberation, and Background Noise subscales (EC, RV, and BN). In addition, these same critical differences can be used to judge the significance of differences between aided and unaided scores. Values of 22% and 26% would approximate the 90% and 95% critical differences, respectively. In contrast to the results for the speech communication subscales, the critical differences for the subscale reflecting perceptions of environmental sounds (AV) are much smaller for the unaided response mode (17% and 21%) than for the aided response mode (31% and 36%). This suggests that although individuals can consistently estimate the aversiveness of unamplified environmental sounds, they are much less certain from time to time about the aversiveness of amplified sounds. The critical differences for the benefit subscales are larger than those for the aided and unaided response modes. This is not surprising because each benefit score is a difference between an aided and an unaided score and incorporates an element of measurement error from both of them. However, aided and unaided responses from the same individual are correlated to some extent, and this acts to reduce slightly the measurement errors associated with their differences. As noted for the unaided and aided response modes, the three speech communication benefit subscales have similar critical differences. Values of 27% and 33% are reasonable estimates of the 90% and 95% critical differences, respectively. Comparison of the critical differences for APHAB subscales with those for corresponding PHAP and PHAB subscales reveals that the two APHAB subscales that were significantly shortened (Background Noise [BNI and Aversiveness [Avl) tend to have larger critical differences, as we would expect. For the two subscales that were only slightly shortened (Ease of Communication [ECI and Reverberation [RVI), the critical differences are much the samd across the various versions of the inventory. The critical differences for each subscale, especially for benefit scores, are relatively large. This means that a sizable interscore difference is necessary before we can conclude with reasonable certainty that two scores for a single subscale are not equal. In our experience, differences of this magnitude are often seen when aided scores are compared with unaided scores. In this case, it is sometimes possible to determine that a hearing aid provides significant benefit in some types of situations but not in others. However, when one hearing aid is compared with another hearing aid, differences as large as 25% to 30% on a single subscale are seldom seen. Furthermore, it seems likely that real differences smaller than this would have practical significance for the success of the fitting. Thus, it is relatively difficult to detect potentially important differences between hearing aids when scores for APHAB subscales are considered separately. However, if results for the three speech communication subscales are evaluated jointly, smaller differences in subscale scores are required to justify a conclusion that there is an overall difference between two fittings. By considering the joint probability of observing a difference favoring the same instrument in all three speech communication subscales (Ease of Communication [ECI, Reverberation [RVI, and Background Noise [BNI), we can arrive at the likelihood that this pattern of results would be observed by chance if each pair of subscale scores was really equal. Assuming a two-way test on the first subscale (EC) followed by one-way tests of the two remaining subscales (RV and BN), we can determine the following: 1) When aided scores are compared for two hearing aids, a difference of 10% or more favoring the same instrument for all three subscales will occur by chance alone on fewer than 2% of observations. 2) When aided scores are compared for two hearing aids, a difference of 5% or more favoring the same instrument for all three subscales will occur by chance alone on fewer than 9% of observations. 3) When benefit scores are compared for two hearing aids, a difference of 10% or more favoring the same instrument for all three subscales will occur by chance alone on fewer than 4% of observations. 4) When benefit scores are compared for two hearing aids, a difference of 5% or more favoring the same instrument for all three subscales will occur by chance alone on fewer than 11% of observations. Thus, it is possible to conclude with reasonable certainty that there is an overall difference in speech communication performance between two hearing aid fittings even when there are no significant interscore differences for any individual subscale. A difference of 10% or more favoring the same hearing aid for the Ease of Communication, Reverberation, and Background Noise subscales can be interpreted with a high level of certainty as indicative of superiority for the favored instrument. A difference of 5% or more for all three subscales approaches the 90% level of certainty. It should be noted that determination of the joint probability associated with any pattern of subscale score differences requires that we assume that the differences between the two scores for each subscale are mutu-
Additionally, the Audiology and Speech Pathology Software Development Group at Memphis State University developed a program for the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit REF to document the outcome of a hearing aid fitting and to compare and evaluate the same fitting over time.
The abbreviated profile of hearing aid benefit.
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