Exploring barriers to hearing help-seeking using behavioral economics: a qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study examines how concepts from Behavioural Economics (BE) can provide insights into the factors influencing decisions to seek help for hearing difficulties from a hearing health professional. DESIGN: A qualitative approach was used, involving semi-structured interviews with individuals experiencing hearing difficulties who had not yet sought help from a hearing health professional. Thematic analysis was conducted, and responses were interpreted using the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Attention, Belief formation, Choice, Determination (ABCD) framework in conjunction with BE principles to explore cognitive and contextual influences to getting hearing help. STUDY SAMPLE: Fifteen participants (aged 57-81, mean age 68 years) were recruited through targeted advertisements. All participants reported noticing hearing difficulties but had not undergone formal hearing assessments or used hearing aids. RESULTS: Participants often minimised the importance of their hearing difficulties, attributing them to ageing or external factors, and described reliance on coping strategies as sufficient for managing daily communication. Perceptions of stigma, uncertainty about the help-seeking process, and beliefs about the thresholds for needing professional help appeared to influence delays in action. While participants expressed intentions to seek help in the future, their responses reflected a tendency to defer action. Many of these barriers are representative of cognitive biases, including the attribution of personal deficiencies to external factors, and the desire to minimise losses over gains. CONCLUSIONS: Applying a BE perspective to hearing health help-seeking decisions offers a nuanced understanding of the psychological and contextual barriers to help-seeking. Interventions that raise awareness of hearing difficulties and reframe help-seeking in ways that address cognitive biases may support earlier engagement with hearing services.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".