Part II: Evaluation of professional functioning 83 Snieders et al. (2020). Communication in quiet and distinguishing sounds received a weighting of 1, detecting sounds and localizing sounds received a weighting of 2, and being exposed to loud sounds and communication in noise received a weighting of 3. This score can vary between 0 and 48. The psychometric properties of this part of the Amsterdam Checklist for Hearing and Work have not been investigated yet. General health condition Patient’s general health condition was inventoried with a single question: how is your general health condition? Response categories were good, moderate, and poor. In accordance with Van der Hoek-Snieders et al. (2020), the answers to this question were dichotomized for the statistical analysis (good versus moderate/poor). Binaural Hearing Impairment Pure-tone audiometry was performed as part of the routinely health care at the audiological centers. The degree of hearing loss was quantified by calculating the Binaural Hearing Impairment (BHI), defined as the mean pure-tone thresholds for air conduction at 1000 Hz, 2000 Hz, and 4000 Hz with a 5:1 weighting favoring the better ear (American Academy of Otolaryngology (Committee on Hearing 1979) . Self-reported hearing ability Self-reported hearing ability was assessed with the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of hearing scale (SSQ) (Gatehouse & Noble, 2004). We used the Dutch version 3.2.1 (2007) that is also available in a shortened form: 17 questions, divided into three domains (Knoop et al., 2021)The first domain, speech comprehension (7 questions), assesses the ability to understand speech in different situations, such as situations in silence, with competing speakers, or in situations with continuous noise. In the second domain, spatial hearing (3 questions), the ability to locate sounds is measured as well as the ability to estimate the distance of sounds. The third domain, quality of hearing (7 questions), assesses the ease of listening, and the naturalness, clarity, and recognizability of different sounds. For each question, the self-rated ability is reflected by a score between 0 and 10, on a visual analogue scale, with higher scores reflecting greater ability (less disability). The average score was calculated for the three scales separately. Due to a programming error, the last question (‘Can you easily ignore other
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