Self-report Measures of Hearing and Vision in Older Adults Participating in the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging are Explained by Behavioral Sensory Measures, Demographic, and Social Factors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Our objectives were to (1) determine the prevalence of self-reported hearing, vision, and dual sensory (both vision and hearing) difficulties in older Canadian adults; (2) examine the association between self-report and behavioral sensory measures; and (3) controlling for behavioral sensory measures, examine variables that might explain the self-reported sensory difficulty, including age, sex, cultural background, socioeconomic status, nonsensory comorbidities, cognitive function, and social factors. DESIGN: We used baseline data collected from the 30,097 participants of the comprehensive cohort of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Participants who were 45 to 85 years of age (mean age = 63 years, SD = ± 10.25) were recruited using provincial health registries and random-digit dialing. Analyses were conducted for the sample as a whole or stratified by age. Behavioral sensory data for hearing (pure-tone audiometry) and vision (pinhole-corrected visual acuity) were collected at 11 data collection sites. Self-reported sensory and personal data were obtained through in-person interviews. "Difficulty" was defined as a response of "fair" or "poor" (versus "excellent," "very good" or "good") to questions about hearing ability (using a hearing aid if used) and vision (using glasses or corrective lenses if used). Individuals with both hearing and vision difficulties were defined as having dual sensory difficulties. Variables associated with self-reported sensory difficulties were analyzed with multiple regression models. RESULTS: Objective 1. The prevalence of impairments based on behavioral measures was higher than the prevalence of difficulties based on self-report measures. The prevalence based on both types of measures increased with age, but the increase was steeper for behavioral measures. Objective 2. In addition to the expected positive associations between self-report and behavioral measures of hearing [odds ratio (OR) = 2.299)] and vision (OR = 15.247), self-reported sensory difficulty was also explained by other within-modality sensory variables, such as the symmetry of impairment and the use of aids. Objective 3. Controlling for behavioral measures of hearing (better-ear pure-tone average) or vision (better-eye visual acuity), older participants were significantly less likely than younger participants to self-report sensory difficulty. Sensory difficulties were reported more often by males and by those with more comorbid health conditions. Compared to those who did not report vision difficulties, those who did report them were more likely to also report hearing difficulties (OR = 2.921) and vice versa (OR = 2.720). There were modality-specific associations with variables relevant to social participation; for example, independent life space was associated with hearing difficulties, and perceived availability of social support and loneliness with vision difficulties. CONCLUSIONS: The low prevalence of self-reported sensory difficulties relative to the behavioral measures of sensory impairments indicates that (a) a simple screening question about sensory ability may not be sufficient to identify older adults who are in the early stages of sensory decline, and (b) self-reported sensory ability is associated with sensory and nonsensory factors. Age, gender, and comorbidities are the most notable nonsensory predictors for both self-reported hearing and vision. These findings shed light on how the self-reported sensory difficulties of older adults may reflect clinical measures of sensory impairment as well as nonsensory factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".