Exploring sense of coherence (SOC) in relation to working conditions for employees with hearing loss.

It is one questionnaire at one point in time, so it cannot show whether the working conditions came before the difference in how people experience work, or the other way round. People volunteered to take part. Only 495 of the 2,930 people invited from the audiological clinic answered, and association members may be more informed about hearing loss than other employees with hearing loss. Only 86 people were in the sick-leave group, so findings about that group rest on small numbers. Several questions, including the one identifying hearing-related sick leave and those on listening devices and workplace adjustments, were written by the authors rather than taken from established questionnaires, and only the workplace-adjustment index had its consistency checked (0.86). The researchers used their own set of questions instead of the existing Work-SOC questionnaire and the full work-experience questionnaire used elsewhere. People who had stopped working altogether were not included; everyone was either in work or on sick leave. The expression 'energy-demanding tasks outside work' may have been understood differently by different participants. The authors note that measuring the size of differences is awkward in this kind of one-off survey.

The study was funded by Stiftelsen Tysta Skolan (grant FB22-0011) and the Faculty of Medicine and Health, Örebro University, Sweden. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not read this as proof that a stronger sense of coherence keeps people in work, or that the working conditions caused the difference. It is one survey at one point in time, so all it shows is that people who were in work described their work more positively than people who had been on sick leave.