Knowledge of hearing tactics: (I) Assessment by questionnaire and inventory

Abstract

There are many ‘hearing tactics’ that a person can employ to improve communication in adverse listening conditions. Poor knowledge or lack of awareness of these tactics may contribute to the disability of a hearing-impaired person. Consequently, the instruction of tactics should be an important component of rehabilitation. A questionnaire was developed to assess an individual's knowledge of tactics. Questionnaire responses were obtained from 45 subjects. In order to standardize the scoring of the questionnaire, an inventory of widely applicable tactics was made. Using the inventory as a scoring key, 6 judges were highly consistent in their assessment of overall numbers of tactics reported by each subject. Data from 3 further subject groups were gathered to give some indication of the range of scores to be expected until population norms are available.