Discrimination scores used in medico-legal assessment of hearing disabilities
Resumé
Objective: Examination of Danish data for medico-legal compensations re-garding hearing disabilities. The purposes are: 1) to investigate whether discrimination scores (DSs) relate to patients’ subjective experience of their hearing and communication ability, 2) to compare DSs from different dis-crimination tests (auditory/audio-visual perception and without/with noise), and 3) to discuss the handicap scaling used for compensation purposes in Denmark. Design: Data for 466 patients from a 15 year period (1999-2014) were analysed. From the data set 50 patients were omitted due to suspicion of exaggerated hearing disabilities. Results: The DSs were found to relate well to the patients’ subjective experience of their speech perception abili-ty. As expected the least challenging test condition (highest DSs) was the audio-visual test without an interfering noise signal, whereas the most chal-lenging condition (lowest DSs) was the auditory test with noise. The hearing and communication handicap degrees were found to agree, whereas the measured handicap degree tended to be higher than the self-assessed handi-cap degree. Conclusions: The DSs can be used to assess patients’ hearing and communication abilities. In order to get better agreements between the measured and self-assessed handicap degrees it may be considered to revise the handicap scaling.
Referencer
Salomon, G. and Parving, A. (1985). “Hearing disability and communication handicap for compensation purposes based on self-assessment and audiometric testing,” Audiology, 24, 135-145.
Downloads
Publiceret
Citation/Eksport
Nummer
Sektion
Licens
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain copyright* and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
*From the 2017 issue onward. The Danavox Jubilee Foundation owns the copyright of all articles published in the 1969-2015 issues. However, authors are still allowed to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.