A Self-Affirmation Intervention to Promote Hearing Aid Use

Summary

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?

Conditions

• Hearing Loss, Functional

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Self-Affirmation Exercise

The self affirming exercise is as follow: The beginning to a sentence appears below. Below it are 4 different ways of completing the sentence. On the lines provided, please write out the beginning of the sentence and then complete it with 1 of the 4 options we have given you. If I feel threatened or anxious, then I will ………………………………….. Options are as follows: think about the things I value about myself, remember things that I have succeeded in, think about what I stand for or think about things that are important to me

BEHAVIORAL

Control

Given a questionnaire minus the self affirming exercise

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Manchester

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Kerry Ware · The University of Manchester

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-10-05

Primary Completion

2021-12-20

Completion

2022-09-26