Part I: Factors inflencing professional functioning 43 checked for interaction effects with the use of hearing aids or not with all variables in the analysis, because the relationship between objective and subjective factors might be different for employees that wear hearing aids. If an interaction term was not found to be significant (p > 0.05), it was removed. Data organization and statistical analysis were performed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25.0 (Armonk New York USA). The critical value of significance was 0.05 for all statistical analyses. Results Participants A total of 294 patients, mean age 56 (SD 8.9), were included the study (Table 2). Patients reported being in good health (60.2%), moderate/poor health (39.1%), andpoor health (0.7%). Since 0.7% of the cases used the third category, this question was dichotomized for the statistical analysis. The mean BHI was 41.3 dB HL (SD 20.76). For the maximum speech discrimination score in quiet, the median was 100% (range 15%–100%). The mean critical SNR was -2 dB (SD 4.4). Hearing aids were used by 58.5% of the patients. All educational levels were represented. The most common professions were teacher (26.6%), administrative job (19.4%), doctor/nurse (10.2%), and managerial jobs (9.2%). Many patientswith andwithoutmanagerial jobs reported to fulfilmanagerial tasks (88.4%).The mean number of working hours per week was 33.6 (SD 8.7). The mean score for NFR was 54.94 (SD 34.12). In 55.8% of the participants, the NFR score was above 54, indicating an increased risk for occupational and health problems (Broersenetal.,2004).ThemeanLEwas 10.28 (SD4.05).TheCPHI resulted in amean score of 79.79 (SD 15.84) for communication strategies and 97.31 (SD 26.23) for PA. A normal distribution was confirmed for all variables, except for the percentage of maximum speech recognition. Even after application of the rationalized arcsine transformation (Sherbecoe & Studebaker, 2004), the variable remained skewed to the right. This variable was therefore not used in the analysis.
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