Tournament strategies in hearing aid selection.
Recently, the elimination tournament has been proposed as an approach to hearing aid selection. In the present study the effects of seeding on the reliability, clinical utility, and validity of the single and double elimination tournament as methods for selecting hearing aids were examined. In an earlier study of round robin tournaments, 12 hearing-impaired subjects were asked to make paired-comparison intelligibility judgments of all possible pairings of eight relatively homogeneous hearing aids. The present study employed these data in a computer-aided simulation of single and double elimination tournaments based on all possible seedings of the eight aids. The results indicated that while group performance was reliable and correlated well with nonsense-syllable identification, the distribution of tournament winners for individual listeners was unreliable and highly dependent on the effects of seeding. These findings were due in part, however, to the similarity of the intelligibility characteristics of the aids employed. Further investigation of the elimination tournament as a method for hearing aid selection is warranted.
D003258:Consumer Behavior; D012048:Correction of Hearing Impairment; D006310:Hearing Aids; D006801:Humans; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests