| Summary: | Currently, all hearing aid benefit outcome measures rely on retrospective self-report, which can often be inaccurate due to memory decay, recollection biases, and the use of cognitive heuristics. Contextual momentary assessment (CMA) involves repeated collection of real-time data on an individual’s experience in their natural environment; CMAs circumvent the error and bias related to retrospective assessments, making them more ecologically valid for capturing day-to-day variations in experiences.
The purpose of the present paper was to answer three research questions: (a) Is CMA capable of facilitating valid and reliable evaluations of subjective listening experiences in lab-controlled acoustic conditions?; (b) Is CMA validity and reliability altered significantly by the timing of the CMA relative to the listening event (Experiment I)?; (c) Is CMA validity and reliability altered by the presence of, or focus on a secondary task (Experiment II)?
To address these research questions, this study employed a block-randomized, within-subject design where 12 participants with sensorineural hearing loss were fitted with hearing aid(s), and completed CMA ratings based on listening situations where they performed a sentence repetition task. The study was comprised of two experiments involving three independent variables: (a) speech level; (b) signal-to-noise ratio (SNR); (c) CMA timing (Experiment I), or task focus (Experiment II). CMAs were composed of four rating dimensions: intelligibility, noisiness, listening effort, and loudness.
For the listening situations employed in this lab study, the reliability, construct validity, and criterion validity results were as follows: (a) intelligibility ratings were reliable, demonstrated construct validity, and had the strongest correlation with intelligibility scores when the CMA was completed after listening situations where there was no secondary task; (b) noisiness ratings were reliable, demonstrated construct validity, and correlated the strongest with measured background noise intensities when rated while experiencing the listening situation; (c) listening effort ratings were unreliable and had questionable construct validity; (d) loudness ratings were reliable, demonstrated construct validity, and correlated the strongest with measured speech intensities when rated while experiencing the listening situation. Based on these results, CMA ratings of intelligibility, loudness, and noisiness, but not listening effort, show potential to be useful for measuring hearing aid benefit. === Medicine, Faculty of === Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of === Graduate
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