Responses of elderly hearing aid users on the hearing aid performance inventory.

The responses of hearing aid users aged 65 to 80 years to a 64-item measure of perceived benefit afforded by hearing aids were collected in order to develop normative data concerning the perceived benefit afforded specifically to elderly patients. Across most of the listening situations evaluated, the elderly respondents reported less perceived benefit than the generally younger listeners from the original normative study for this measure. For the current respondents, perceived hearing aid benefit was not related to variables such as average hearing loss, hearing aid style, or length of hearing aid use, but was related to hours per week of hearing aid use. A shortened version of this questionnaire is proposed, which uses just those questions most likely to be answered by elderly respondents.