Production and evaluation of a Polish version of the LittlEars questionnaire for the assessment of auditory development in infants.

OBJECTIVE To adapt the LittlEars questionnaire into Polish and to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Polish version of the questionnaire. METHODS A back-translation method was used to translate the LittlEars questionnaire into Polish. The translated version was first evaluated by means of an expert-appraisal method. After having improved the Polish version of LittlEars with the results obtained from that evaluation, various psychometric analyses were conducted. Study participants included 310 parents or other caregivers of children with normal hearing whose ages ranged between 0.5 and 24.0 months. Corrected item-total correlations were calculated to evaluate the extent to which the different questions distinguish levels of auditory development of the assessed children. Cronbach's alpha coefficient--to evaluate internal consistency across items--was also calculated. To obtain estimates of validity, correlations between item/total score and age were calculated. A non-linear regression model was derived to obtain normative data for expected and minimum values of total scores from the questionnaire according to age. RESULTS Corrected item-total correlations ranged from 0.14 to 0.84. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.95, indicating that the measurements were highly reliable. The linear correlation between total scores and age was 0.90 (p<.001). The regression analysis conducted to obtain normative data showed that 83% of the variance in the total scores can be explained by age. CONCLUSION The results of psychometric analyses support the use of the Polish version of the LittlEars questionnaire as a sensitive and reliable tool to assess the development of auditory behavior in Polish children between 3 and 24 months of age.