Tutorial on using Ecological Momentary Assessment to evaluate real-life hearing

What is it about?

Testing hearing abilities or hearing problems in the laboratory is often done in artificial situations and does not necessarily capture the challenges individuals with hearing impairment face in their daily lives. A method to evaluate perceptions and feelings in everyday life is ecological momentary assessment (EMA). This method comprises answering multiple surveys in the current situation - often several times per day. This way it should be representative of everyday life, minimize memory bias, and be sensitive to different contexts. Nowadays it is often done via smartphone and also allows collecting objective data, for example, the environmental sound pressure level. Here a group of experts in EMA in audiology collected their experience and provides a list of attributes that can be used in EMA surveys. While the method is too diverse and still too new in audiology to give definitive recommendations, this paper contains many aspects to consider when designing an EMA study which hopefully are helpful to researchers new to EMA.

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Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

Why is it important?

EMA has been around in other disciplines for decades but only gained popularity in audiology recently. While it can be a powerful tool, there are also many pitfalls in designing a study. In other areas there are guidelines how to use EMA already. However, in hearing research we deal with a few problems, that are less relevant in other areas. For example, hearing problems are highly dependent on the acoustic environment, which can change very quickly. We can collect data on the environmental sound pressure level, but that requires exact knowledge of the time participants are reporting on. However, in some of the most relevant situations in hearing research, e.g. conversations, participants may be reluctant to answer a survey on the smartphone in the situation as phone usage in society may be regarded impolite or they already struggle to understand and do not have the cognitive resources to answer a survey on top of that. So, they may answer the survey either not at all or after the situation, making it difficult for the researcher to match the recorded sound level with the participants’ responses. There are multiple research questions where EMA can be applied and many different design choices that may influence participant burden and the quality of collected results. Hence beginners may benefit from a guideline. Also, a standardized core set of questions could not only facilitate the study setup and ensure valid results, but also enable pooling results over several studies, which often have only small sample sizes. In addition, it enables comparison across studies at different times or from different laboratories.

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