The development and standardization of Self-assessment for Hearing Screening of the Elderly

Abstract

Purpose

The present study aimed to develop and standardize a screening tool for elderly people who wish to check for themselves their level of hearing loss.

Methods

The Self-assessment for Hearing Screening of the Elderly (SHSE) consisted of 20 questions based on the characteristics of presbycusis using a five-point scale: seven questions covered general issues related to sensorineural hearing loss, seven covered hearing difficulty under distracting listening conditions, two covered hearing difficulty with fast-rated speech, and four covered the working memory function during communication. To standardize SHSE, 83 elderly participants took part in the study: 25 with normal hearing, and 22, 23, and 13 with mild, moderate, and moderate-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss, respectively, according to their hearing sensitivity. All were retested 3 weeks later using the same questionnaire to confirm its reliability. In addition, validity was assessed using various hearing tests such as a sentence test with background noise, a time-compressed speech test, and a digit span test.

Results

SHSE and its subcategories showed good internal consistency. SHSE and its subcategories demonstrated high test–retest reliability. A high correlation was observed between the total scores and pure-tone thresholds, which indicated gradually increased SHSE scores of 42.24%, 55.27%, 66.61%, and 78.15% for normal hearing, mild, moderate, and moderate-to-severe groups, respectively. With regard to construct validity, SHSE showed a high negative correlation with speech perception scores in noise and a moderate negative correlation with scores of time-compressed speech perception. However, there was no statistical correlation between digit span results and either the SHSE total or its subcategories. A confirmatory factor analysis supported three factors in SHSE.

Conclusion

We found that the developed SHSE had valuable internal consistency, test–retest reliability, and convergent and construct validity. These results suggest that SHSE is a reliable and valid measure to represent the degree of hearing loss in the elderly.

Keywords:

• hearing screening
• self-assessment
• questionnaire
• presbycusis
• aging

Supplementary material

Table S1 Self-assessment for Hearing Screening of the Elderly

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our subjects for their voluntary participation and their time in this experiment. Preliminary data of this work was presented at the 2016 Annual Conference of American Auditory Society (Scottsdale, AZ, USA). This research was completed with support from Hallym University Research Fund (HRF-201604-008).

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.