(MBRC) A brief psychological intervention to increase use of hearing aids

Hearing loss is a significant public health problem that ranks alongside diabetes in terms of disease burden, yet significant numbers of people eschew hearing aids. Suboptimal use of hearing aids does little to alleviate the burden associated with hearing loss and leads to significant wastage in the NHS. Research suggests that the threat associated with being diagnosed with hearing loss and being given a hearing aid contributes to suboptimal use of hearing aids (Dawes et al., 2014) and so overcoming this barrier should increase hearing aid use. Self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1998) offers one means of helping people overcome the threat associated with being prescribed hearing aids. One of our recent studies showed that people who were encouraged to self-affirm used their hearing aids for almost 2 hours/day longer than people who did not self-affirm (Armitage et al., 2017). The proposed research will build on the preliminary findings of Armitage et al. (2017) to develop a theory-driven intervention that will increase hearing aid use among people attending hearing health clinics.

Although Armitage et al.’s (2017) study shows that such research is feasible and acceptable to patients in audiology clinics, it was not sufficiently powered to detect significant effects. The principal aim of the proposed studentship is to conduct a fully-powered randomised controlled trial of a self-affirmation—based intervention to improve hearing aid use. In addition to increasing the sample size, we would also like to address some further limitations in the original study, specifically:
1. Although “anxiety about ageing” was the hypothesized mediator, our chosen measure (Lasher & Faulkender, 1993) was limited and it would be valuable to use an improved measure.
2. Armitage et al. (2017) reported ‘ceiling’ effects for motivation and it would be valuable to see whether changes in “post-motivational” constructs such as self-regulation were able to mediate the effects of self-affirmation on behaviour change.
3. Explore whether there are alternative means of reducing anxieties about ageing that maybe more effective than self-affirmation. For example, even within the self-affirmation literature, manipulations have focused on influencing the “individual self” (i.e., the characteristics that differentiate the person from others) as opposed to (for example) people’s sense of self in relation to their family (the “familial self”), which may be particular important in the context of hearing health (e.g., Cai et al., 2013). Beyond self-affirmation theory, there may be additional approaches to reducing anxieties about ageing that are worthy of investigation.

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/Chris.armitage/