Audibility-based counseling for parents of children with hearing loss

The purpose of this study was to examine how different descriptions of childhood hearing loss (HL) impact parents who are going through the evaluation process. We proposed that using descriptions based on audibility (or the amount of sound a child has access to, measured on a percentage scale) will lead to more parent concern than our current descriptions (based on level of HL, using words like slight, mild, and moderate). We also wanted to evaluate how often audiologists report information regarding audibility or functional implications of HL compared to descriptions of HL level. Finally, we examined the different counseling experiences of parents whose children currently wear hearing aids and gather their feedback on the use of audibility during parent counseling.

Our results show that descriptions using audibility resulted in higher levels of concern about HL than words like slight, mild, and moderate; however, hearing loss simulation (hearing an audio recording of what HL sounds like) produced the highest amount of parent concern about HL. In general, our results showed that audiologists do not often use any descriptions beyond level of HL in their written reports. Parents of children with HL reacted positively to audibility-based descriptions. Many parents shared that it was difficult to understand exactly what their child’s HL diagnosis meant for their development. Our work reveals that audibility is a promising tool to describe HL in a way that is relevant to our primary audience (parents of children with HL) in order to motivate appropriate action.