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Does an Audiologist’s Person-Centered Discourse During a Hearing Aid Orientation Effect the Patient’s Self Efficacy?

Year: 2023


Presenter Name: Tess Crawford

Description
This study aimed to determine whether the manner in which a videoed clinician orients an individual to hearing aids (person-centered (PC) or clinician-centered (CC)) affects their processing fluency and comprehension of the material. Furthermore, we were curious if such effects are moderated by the individual's health literacy. This study employed a between-subjects experimental design. The independent variable was delivery method (person-centered (PC), clinician-centered (CC)). The dependent variables were processing fluency rating and comprehension accuracy; health literacy served as moderator. 100 participants will be recruited via Prolific (2022), an online paid service to recruit participants and conduct behavioral studies. Participants must be 18 years or older, must communicate confidently in spoken and written English, have self-reported typical hearing, and self-reported typical cognitive functioning. During the study, each participant first completed a health literacy measure, The New Vital Sign (Weiss et al., 2005). Participants were then randomly designed to a video stimulus (PC or CC). The PC video included dialogue aspects such as, avoiding lengthy details, clearly explaining tasks with a hearing aid as a model, and refraining from the use of medical jargon. The CC video highlighted multiple pieces of information simultaneously, provide lots of details and superfluous information, and include a large amount of medical jargon. After the participant finished watching their assigned video, they completed the processing fluency survey via a 1-7 Likert scale, as well as 5 brief multiple-choice, comprehension questions about hearing aids. We are currently in the process of completing data collection. However, we plan to calculate descriptive statistics, and conduct a regression analysis to analyze our data. We predict that participants who viewed the video of an audiologist orienting the research participant in a person-centered (PC) manner will have comparatively higher comprehension accuracy and processing fluency scores than participants viewing a similar video of an audiologist orienting their patient to hearing aids in a clinician-centered (CC) manner. Furthermore, we predict that participants' health literacy levels will moderate this relationship. Communication challenges between well-educated clinicians and their patients can result in miscommunications, and poor motivation to continue health care and interventions, which can have detrimental effects to individuals' overall health and wellbeing. In audiology, hearing aid orientations, are often standardized and clinician centered. We predict that our data will support the need for audiologist to communicate more effectively with their patients in a patient-centered manner (e.g., use minimal jargon). This may ultimately ensure that patients could put their cognitive effort into understanding how a diagnosis/treatment applies to them and their care instead of working so hard to decipher what an audiologist is sharing. Such a facilitated understanding could lead to improved hearing aid use in future patients and improved overall hearing health.
University / Institution: Utah State University
Type: Poster
Format: In Person
Presentation #A87
SESSION A (9:00-10:30AM)
Area of Research: Health & Medicine
Faculty Mentor: Brittan Barker