Audiograms

84.6% of 527 participants have a complete audiogram available.

PTA4 = sum of thresholds at (0.5 + 1 + 2 + 4) kHz / 4 (note that 3 kHz thresholds were not measured).

Hearing asymmetry = absolute value of PTA4 difference between ears

Subjective hearing loss = ‘Yes’ to “Do you have a hearing loss?”

Hearing difficulty = ‘Poor’ or ‘Fair’ to “How would you rate your hearing…”

IOI-HA

Only those who said that they use “Hearing aids” (n = 103) in the Subjective Hearing section are presented with this scale.

Responses are discrete options, ranging from 1 (poorer outcome) to 5 (better outcome). The overall score is an average of responses (Cox & Alexander, 2002).

Tinnitus

Source: Canadian Health Measures Survey 2014-2015 (cycle 4).

About half of 572 participants report having tinnitus, most of them within the last 7 days.

##     Tinnitus    %
## 1        Yes 49.1
## 2         No 44.8
## 3 Don't know  0.0
## 4       <NA>  6.1

##   When experienced Count
## 1          Last 7d   172
## 2       8d to 1 mo    15
## 3           1-6 mo    25
## 4          6-12 mo    14
## 5            1 yr+    33
## 6             <NA>     0

##   Bother    %
## 1    Yes 28.6
## 2     No 71.4
## 3   <NA>  0.0

##   More than 5min    %
## 1       All/Most 37.1
## 2          A lot 12.7
## 3           Some 21.6
## 4  Not past year 10.0
## 5          Never 13.1
## 6           <NA>  5.4

##         Annoy    %
## 1    Severely  5.2
## 2  Moderately 21.3
## 3    Slightly 42.7
## 4  Not at all 18.0
## 5 Do not know  0.5
## 6        <NA> 12.3

15i-SSQ

Responses are a continuous sliding scale from 0 (“Not at all”) to 10 (“Perfectly”). “Not Applicable” is a valid response option.
Responses are averaged within 3 clusters of questions to form scores for each subscale, with a higher score indicating better hearing.

EmoCheQ

Responses are 5 discrete options, ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). The overall score is an average of responses, with lower numbers indicating better emotion perception. No items are reverse-coded.

HHIE-S

Responses are 3 discrete options, Yes / Sometimes / No. Subscores are sums of responses in each cluster of questions, with a higher score indicating a poorer outcome.

Correlation between measures

Note that “subjective hearing loss” and “hearing difficulty” are binary measures, whereas the rest are continuous.

Other variables available

Types of hearing assistive devices used (almost all hearing aids)
Date of last hearing checkup
Number of years using hearing aids
Hearing-related items on the CRSQ such as “I have had diﬃculty hearing conversations in noisy places”

Hearing