PURPOSE: to evaluate the Brazilian Portuguese version of the instrument "Beliefs and Attitudes on Hearing Loss Prevention", developed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in 1996. METHOD: the development of the Portuguese scale followed the following steps: translation from English into Brazilian Portuguese, pre-test with a group of 10 workers compared to the target population, linguistic adaptation, review of grammatical and idiomatic equivalence, and reverse translation into English in order to check that the instrument remained true to its original version. Following this elements, the Portuguese instrument was validated with the group of 31 workers. The participating workers came from a meat-packing company. Seventeen were males and 14 were females, and their mean age was 29 years and 7 months. The questions were constructed using a 5-point Likert scale where 1 meant "disagree completely" and 5 meant "agree completely." A factorial analysis was conducted in order to check construct validity of correlated questionnaire items. The participants responded to the first questionnaire (version A) and 15 days later responded to the second questionnaire (Version B). RESULTS: the validity of the entire instrument was demonstrated by a Cronbach's Alpha of 0.8146 for the version A of the instrument and 0.8569 for the Version B. The significant correlations among related questionnaire items indicate the validity of its format and content for the intended usage with a Brazilian Portuguese version with a population of workers. CONCLUSIONS: the questionnaire was translated and adapted to Brazilian Portuguese and will facilitate the evaluation of attitudes and beliefs of Brazilian-Portuguese speaking workers towards noise and hearing loss prevention.
Hearing; Hearing Loss, Noise-induced; Ear Protective Devices
