Development of an Abbreviated Adult Reading History Questionnaire (ARHQ-Brief) Using a Machine Learning Approach
The Adult Reading History Questionnaire (ARHQ) is among the most commonly used self-reported questionnaires to screen adults to assess their reading history. High ARHQ scores indicate an increased likelihood that an adult had reading difficulties as a child, and that their children may develop reading disorder (RD). Although a variety of ARHQ-revised exist, whether using a subset of ARHQ items could be equally effective and hence more efficient has yet to be determined. We created an abbreviated version of the ARHQ, tilted the ARHQ-brief, that reduced the number of items down from 23 to 6, and compared its performance with that of the full ARHQ on reading skills in adults and their children. Data from 97 adults and 51 children were included. With the ARHQ-brief, we report a threshold of 0.323 as suitable to identify past RD in adults with a sensitivity of 72.4% and a specificity of 81.5%. Comparison of predictive performances between ARHQ-brief and ARHQ showed that ARHQ-brief explained an additional 10-35.2% of the variance in adult and child reading. Further, we validated ARHQ-brief’s outperformance to predict reading ability using an independent sample of 32 children. We close by discussing limitations and future directions.