Hearing Loss, Functional clinical trials

A Self-Affirmation Intervention to Promote Hearing Aid Use

Hearing aids are the number one treatment for hearing loss and it is estimated that out of the 2 million of UK individuals who are supplied with hearing aids 1.4 million will use their hearing aids to varying degrees and the other 0.6 million will stop using their hearing aids altogether. The proposed research is looking to improve hearing aid usage by using a self-affirmation intervention which lowers the threat of participants' ageing anxiety. The target of lowering participants' ageing anxiety to improve hearing aid use is because there is a stigma of hearing aids making people seem old and this stigma can make individuals resistant to wearing their hearing aids as they do not want to be seen in this light. The current proposed research is an extension of a pilot study that was conducted in 2016 which found that a self-affirmation intervention may be useful in improving individuals' hearing aid usage. They randomly allocated 50 first-time hearing aid users either to a group that undertook a self-affirming exercise (e.g., "If I feel threatened or anxious, then I will think about the things I value about myself") or to a no-intervention control group. Consistent with the idea that self-affirmation helps people deal with threat, first-time hearing aid users reported significantly lower anxieties about ageing after self-affirming. Moreover, according to the data usage downloaded from their hearing aids (data-logging), the self-affirming group were found to have worn their hearing aids an average of two hours per day longer than the control group. Due to the limited number of participants, the effects of the intervention were not statistically significant. Nevertheless, the low cost and high potential public health "reach" alongside the effect size of d = 0.43 indicates that the intervention shows promise. The main aim of this research is to re-test the self-affirmation intervention from the previous pilot study with a sufficiently large enough sample to answer the following "Does a self-affirmation intervention improve participant's hearing aid usage when compared to participants in the control group?