Abstract
Clinicians are often concerned that unrealistic prefitting expectations can have a
negative impact on fitting success for new hearing aid wearers. To investigate this
concern and to explore the potential value of measuring expectations, we developed
the Expected Consequences of Hearing aid Ownership (ECHO) questionnaire as a companion
to the Satisfaction with Amplification in Daily Life questionnaire. Four experiments
were conducted to (1) determine realistic expectations for hearing aids, (2) evaluate
expectations of new users, (3) measure reliability of prefitting expectations, and
(4) assess relationships between prefitting expectations and postfitting satisfaction.
Novice hearing aid users were found to have stable prefitting expectations about hearing
aids, and these expectations were unrealistically high for the typical individual.
There were many different expectation patterns across subjects. Of the four subscales
of the ECHO, only one was predictive of the corresponding satisfaction data. Potential
clinical applications are described.
Abbreviations: ECHO = Expected Consequences of Hearing aid Ownership, SADL = Satisfaction with Amplification
in Daily Life, 3FAHL = better-ear three-frequency (500–2000 Hz) pure-tone average
hearing loss
Key Words
Hearing aids - outcome measure - satisfaction