Empowerment is the process through which individuals with hearing-related challenges acquire and use knowledge, skills and strategies, and increase self-efficacy, participation, and the feeling of control of their hearing health care, hearing solutions, and everyday lives.
The EmpAQ-15 and EmpAQ-5 are the first measures to be developed specifically for the measurement of empowerment in adults with hearing loss, and are among the few hearing-related self-report measures to be developed and validated using both modern and traditional methods for item refinement and psychometric analysis. The EmpAQ-15 and EmpAQ-5 have strong psychometric properties, including that they satisfy the Rasch model requirements for interval-level measurement, and therefore, have the potential to be used as both research and clinical tools for measuring individual changes in empowerment along the hearing journey as well as for making group comparisons.
**Empowerment Audiology Questionnaire-15 (EmpAQ-15):** This 15-item questionnaire was developed and intended to be used for in-depth research and/or clinical work with a population of adult hearing device users.
**Empowerment Audiology Questionnaire-5 (EmpAQ-5):** This 5-item questionnaire was developed and intended to be used as a brief clinical tool for both device and non-device users.