Objective: Translating the newly developed Empowerment Audiology Questionnaire, EmpAQ-15 to Swedish, and performing content validation on the Swedish version.
Design: Best-practice principles using forward and back translations which were revised by a committee prior to field testing. Field testing was conducted by cognitive interviews with hearing-aid users talking through and rating the items in the translated questionnaire. Content validation was assessed by examining equivalence, accessibility, acceptability, comprehensiveness, and relevance of interview data. Questionnaire introduction and scoring instructions were evaluated by Swedish audiologists.
Study sample: Ten adult native speaking Swedish hearing aid users, recruited with purposive sampling. Maximum variation based on age, gender, hearing aid usage, and degree of hearing loss. Seven Swedish audiologists assessing instructions for result calculations.
Results: The conceptual equivalence between the Swedish translation and the English original questionnaire was judged to be high overall. The instructions and majority of items were experienced as accessible, acceptable, comprehensive, and relevant. The audiologists showed that they could follow scoring instructions and reason about the results.
Conclusions: This content validity study was the first step towards a Swedish version of a self- report measure of Empowerment for people with hearing loss.
Keywords: Content validity; Empowerment; Hearing loss; Outcome measure; Qualitative research; Translation.
There is a need for using measurement tools that work outside of an English language context. Questionnaires that use best-practice translation and that incorporates solid validation methodology, including language-specific cultural considerations will likely function better when applied in clinical contexts. In Sweden there is a call for working more patient-centered and within a hearing healthcare context the concept of empowerment is one way of enabling this. Empowerment in the context of hearing challenges involves acquiring knowledge, skills and strategies to enhance self-efficacy, participation, and control over hearing solutions and daily life. This study describes the best-practice translation, cultural adaptation, and content validation process of the newly developed and validated Empowerment Audiology Questionnaire, EmpAQ. From analysis of interview data from hearing aid users that completed and discussed the translated questionnaire we learned that the translation matched the original questionnaire. The instructions and majority of items were experienced as accessible, acceptable, comprehensive, and relevant overall. This is a crucial step toward having a Swedish version of EmpAQ to assess empowerment in people with hearing loss.
© 2024. The Author(s).