Psychosocial impacts of hearing impairment on adults and their spouses

Abstract

Understanding the psychosocial impact of hearing impairment to patients and their spouses is critical to provide optimal audiological management. Literature revealed that hearing impairment resulted in poor satisfaction between couples leading to deterioration of the quality of life. Despite the reports on psychosocial impacts in both, little attention has been paid to determine the relationship of both (spouse and patient) psychosocial consequences. Introducing coping strategies requires the knowledge on the psychosocial impact severity, subsequently the association in both parties. While there were substantial evidences on the effect of hearing impairment among elderly, there is still scant evident on the effects among adult’s population. Present study aimed to investigate the psychosocial impacts on adults with hearing loss (AHL) and their spouses. Study conducted in this thesis was completed in two phases. The first study was the translation and validation of two instruments into Malay language. Fifty-eight AHL and 58 normal hearing adults, together with 32 spouses of AHL and 32 spouses of normal hearing adults participated in this study. Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adult (HHIA) was used to evaluate the psychosocial impact for the AHL while, Significant Other Scale for Hearing Disability (SOSHEAR) was used to evaluate the same issue on the spouse. Both instruments were successfully translated and validated as revealed by the Cronbach alpha 0.97 and 0.98 respectively, and the inter-item correlation for each subscale ranged between 0.31 to 0.81 for HHIA-M and 0.41 to 0.89 for SOSHEAR-M establishing convergent validity in both questionnaires. Significant higher scores were observed in experimental groups for both HHIA-M and SOSHEAR-M than control groups demonstrating good discriminant validity. In second study, the validated questionnaires were used in investigating the existence of self-perceived disability among AHL and spouses, subsequently the association of the psychosocial impacts between them. The HHIA-M total score’s average for 58 participants demonstrated the existence of mild psychosocial disability among AHL. Meanwhile, the average of SOSHEAR-M total score for 32 spouses was 0.78 demonstrated mild psychosocial disability among spouses of AHL. Twenty-six couples participated in the survey using these translated questionnaires to determine the association of psychosocial impacts between the two groups. Spearman correlation showed no significant association between HHIA-M and SOSHEAR-M scores (rs=0.32, p>0.05). Majority couples (76.92%) had higher SOSHEAR-M scores than HHIA-M suggesting most spouses are more affected by their partners’ hearing impairment as compared to the patients themselves. No significant association was found between hearing loss level in AHL and their spouses’ SOSHEAR-M score (rs=0.26, p>0.05). This study concluded that hearing impairment affects AHL and their spouses’ psychosocial functions, with higher impact were observed in most of the spouses than their AHL partners. Hence, a reasonable approach to address this issue could be further investigated to understand how spouses’ disability level could affect their daily functioning, subsequently implementing appropriate management plan individually based on their self-reported assessment.