Italian adaptation of Listening Effort Assessment Scale and Fatigue Assessment Scale questionnaires

Objective. The purpose of this study is to adapt linguistically and culturally the Listening Effort Assessment Scale (EAS) and Fatigue Assessment Scale (FAS) questionnaires into Italian (EAS-IT and FAS-IT) and to investigate the reliability and validity of these scales in normal hearing and hearing-impaired subjects. Methods. The Italian adaptation of the EAS and FAS questionnaires was conducted based on back and forward translation methodology. Both questionnaires were administered to 101 normal hearing (NH) subjects and 88 hearing-impaired subjects including 19 hearing aid users (HA), 50 cochlear implant users (CI) and 19 affected by single-sided deafness (SSD). Results. Both questionnaires showed a high reliability (Cronbach's alpha was 0.953 for EAS-IT and 0.837 for FAS-IT). EAS-IT showed high internal consistency with item-rest correlations. The inter-item correlation of the FAS-IT shows a difference in the internal consistency of item 4. A high significance between the NH group and the 3 hearing loss groups (HA, CI, SSD) was found for EAS-IT, but no significant difference was found between NH and the single hearing-impaired groups for FAS-IT. Conclusions. EAS-IT showed good internal reliability and validity and is sensitive to hearing loss.