Adjusting Expectations: Hearing Abilities in a Population-Based Sample Using an SSQ Short Form.
Petra von Gablenz, Fabian Otto-Sobotka, Inga Holube
PMID 30022731WHAT IT FOUND
Among 1,711 adults, SSQ hearing scores were lower with reported hearing difficulties, asymmetry, health issues and low education, while age showed no consistent effect.
Use score distributions rather than a single cut-off to interpret questionnaires.
Key findings
01Self-reported hearing difficulties were the most influential factor, with score decreases between 0.7 and 1.3 scale points, most pronounced in the speech subscale.
02Speech subscale scores decreased almost linearly with better-ear PTA4, while spatial subscale scores hardly followed PTA4.
03Age coefficients were low and consistently failed to reach significance.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The overall response rate was 21%, and it was 12% in adults younger than 40 years and 21% in adults older than 80 years. The sample was biased toward higher social status groups, with 36% assigned to the highest International Classification of Occupations skill level. Hearing aid users were excluded from the main analysis, so the sample had better hearing than the general population. Only 71 of 1,711 participants had disabling hearing loss with PTA4 of 35 dB HL or more, so the effect of hearing loss on SSQ scores may be underestimated. Missing values were imputed from other items, which can affect estimates. The study is cross-sectional, so it describes associations rather than showing that any factor causes lower scores. The sample was drawn from northwest Germany and used a German SSQ17 short form.
Declared interests
The paper names federal resources of Niedersächsisches Vorab within the research focus Hearing in everyday life (HALLO), the Research Association of German Hearing Aid Acousticians, and Lower Saxony funding with HÖRSTAT as funders.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat a low SSQ17 score as proof of severe hearing loss. In this population, pure-tone hearing was only modestly associated with scores, and reported hearing difficulty, health issues, education, and asymmetry also lowered ratings.