Author Response to Sabour (2018), "Comment on Hall et al. (2017), 'How to Choose Between Measures of Tinnitus Loudness for Clinical Research? A Report on the Reliability and Validity of an Investigator-Administered Test and a Patient-Reported Measure Using Baseline Data Collected in a Phase IIa Drug Trial'".

Purpose: The authors respond to a letter to the editor (Sabour, 2018) concerning the interpretation of validity in the context of evaluating treatment-related change in tinnitus loudness over time.
Method: The authors refer to several landmark methodological publications and an international standard concerning the validity of patient-reported outcome measurement instruments.
Results: The tinnitus loudness rating performed better against our reported acceptability criteria for (face and convergent) validity than did the tinnitus loudness matching test.
Conclusion: It is important to distinguish between tests that evaluate the validity of measuring treatment-related change over time and tests that quantify the accuracy of diagnosing tinnitus as a case and non-case.