title: A comparison of manual methods for measuring hearing levels.
abstract: A comparison was made of three manual methods for measuring pure-tone sensitivity; one method is proposed by the Education Committee of the British Society of Audiology (BSA), the second method is recommended by the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) and the third is a shortened version of the ASHA method. 9 normally-hearing and 5 hearing-impaired subjects from differing educational backgrounds were tested at 1.0 kHz a total of fifteen times on each of the methods. False-positive responses were noted throughout the testing and also in a 20-second time-out period. Each threshold run was timed and the subjects were asked to rate each threshold run on a 10-point scale for ease of the task. No significant differences among the three methods were found in their threshold estimates, standard deviations, number of false-positive responses, or subject preferences. The ASHA method took longer and required more tone presentations to establish threshold. The number of successive tone presentations to which the subject did not respond was also counted. The BSA method produced more, and longer silent intervals than the other two methods.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001299:Audiometry / Q000379:methods*; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone / Q000379:methods*; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D004522:Educational Status; D005189:False Positive Reactions; D005260:Female; D006311:Hearing Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged