Reliability and stability of various hearing-aid outcome measures in a group of elderly hearing-aid wearers

Twenty elderly persons with hearing impairment were fit with binaural in-the-ear hearing aids and followed for a 6-month period post-fit. Several hearing-aid outcome measures were obtained at 0, 7, 15, 30, 60, 90, and 180 days post-fit. Outcome measures included (a) objective measures of benefit obtained with nonsense-syllable materials in quiet (CUNY Nonsense Syllable Test, NST) and sentences in multitalker babble (Hearing in Noise Test, HINT); (b) two subjective measures of benefit, one derived from pre-fit/post-fit comparisons on a general scale of hearing handicap (Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly, HHIE) and the other based on a subjective scale of post-fit hearing-aid benefit (Hearing Aid Performance Inventory, HAPI); (c) a questionnaire on hearing-aid satisfaction; (d) an objective measure of hearing-aid use; and (e) a subjective measure of hearing-aid use. Reliability and stability of each measure were examined through repeated-measures analyses of variance, a series of test-retest correlations, and, where possible, scatterplots of the scores against their corresponding 95% critical differences. Many of the measures were found to be both reliable and stable indicators of hearing-aid outcome.