International Hearing Research Priorities

We need the opinions of all hearing researchers

The Aim

We need the members of the international hearing research community, to help us finish developing a clear set of international priorities for hearing research, through an online ranking exercise.

The Project in brief

• Using experts in the field, we have identified 36 distinct priorities in hearing research (all of it!).
• Now, we are seeking the opinions of everyone in hearing research to rank order those priorities.
• We will publish the results in a peer-reviewed open-access format, which researchers can cite in grant proposals, or use when talking with funders and policy makers.

What we need hearing researchers to do now (even if you contributed previously)!
Now, we are asking everyone involved in hearing research to rank these priorities in terms of their importance, to them and their research.

• We want the opinions of all hearing researchers, and as many of them as possible.
• All areas of expertise within hearing research (fundamental science, clinical, psychology, biology etc. etc.)
• All levels of experience and position.
• Including those experts who have already contributed (thank you – but we need you again!).

Please tell your colleagues, your students, your postdocs, your research assistants, your supervisor, your lab PI, your institute director – anyone who is involved in hearing research.

The more people that take part, the more legitimate the conclusions will be!

More information, and the survey itself, can be found here:  https://tinyurl.com/hearingranking

You can in principle do this on a smartphone, but it is fiddly and may not work very well. We recommend a computer.  We now aim to close the survey on the 31^st of December.

If you want to know more about the results so far, read onæ¦

What we have achieved so far

We are using a mixed methods approach to derive an agreed set of priorities, with 5 distinct phases:

Figure 1. Overall methodology, using qualitative methods to identify priorities and quantitative to rank them.  

Phase 1 – Expert input (UK)

This project began within the UK, because it was funded by the UK Acoustics Network. 18 UK experts in the field of hearing research were asked:

1. What are key scientific challenges in your field which can be tackled by the UK’s acoustics research community a) now or b) within 10 years?
2. What would be an adventurous and exciting idea in acoustics which is ambitious enough to transform the research landscape for a community wider than acoustics through a large-scale investment?
3. What are key industry challenges in your field to address now through acoustics research?

This was performed as part of a wider survey of priorities in Acoustics (https://acoustics.ac.uk/acoustics-research-priorities/), overall and not just hearing. But that inspired usæ¦

Phase 2 – Expert input (worldwide)

Phase 1 inspired us to pursue a rigorous priority setting process for hearing research and to extend it outside of the UK.

58 researchers (majority with 11+ years of experience in the field) listed up to 5 challenges that need to be tackled by the hearing research community.

For each challenge they were asked to:

1. Describe the challenge.
2. What are the current roadblocks to addressing the challenge.

To ensure the anonymity of the expert contributors, limited demographic information was collected. It reveals some spread across the globe, with a concentration of European contributors.

Figure 2. Spread of expert respondents for Phase 1 and 2.

Phase 3 (2023-2024) – Thematic analysis

We performed a thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) of all the text submitted by our experts, to distil distinct themes:

• Each response coded by one of three researchers (AH, CS, RM), then aggregated iteratively to define themes.
• Note: this stage does not seek to rank the themes, only to identify them.
• At the end of extensive interaction with the data, 36 themes emerged which we felt could not be rationalised further without losing nuances (Table 1).

The detailed information about each theme and its explanation provided in written, audio, and video format (YouTube; accessible via the survey)

Table 1. A list of themes extracted from the Phase 1 and 2 data.

Phase 4 (on-going and in need of your input) – Prioritisation

In phase 4, we are seeking the participation of all hearing researchers, worldwide, to rank order the themes into priorities. At time of writing, we had almost 60 respondents. We are aiming to reach around 200.

• Each participant rank orders all the extracted themes. This is done via a click-and-drag interface (Figure 3).
• Each theme contains a short explanation based on codes distilled from Phase 2.
• It is important that for this stage we reach a wide range of hearing researchers for the ranks to have validity.

Respondents so far indicate that it is much easier to do on a computer than a phone, where it does not always display correctly.

Figure 3. A screenshot of the ranking tool in the survey. We asked people to rank order all the priorities, and to also break this ranking into four different categories of importance.

Phase 5 – Analysis and writing-up (preliminary).

Results so far are highly preliminary, as we do not have enough respondents for the ranking survey of Phase 4 to make clear statements. We present them here to encourage more hearing researchers to respond.

We took all the raw rankings from the respondents and analysed it with a Placket-Luce ranking model (Figure 4).

The top-six ranked priorities at this point are:

1. Auditory Perception.
2. Better diagnostics.
3. Better outcome measures.
4. Individual differences.
5. Better hearing aids.
6. Better speech comprehension.

The confidence intervals for these top six imply a degree of consensus, with no overlap of the top three with the main bulk of the remaining priorities. Descriptions for the current top 6 priorities are given in table 2.

Most of the remaining priorities cannot currently be distinguished, although a few of the lowest ranked priorities appear to be considered genuinely of less importance than most.

If you are a hearing researcher, do you agree with these? Or Disagree? Have your say!

https://tinyurl.com/hearingranking

If you are a hearing researcher, please help us arrive at a valid ranking of priorities, by taking part. This will benefit all of hearing research and its beneficiaries.

Figure 4. Preliminary ranking of priorities, in order of “worthæ. The Placket-Luce model assumes an underlying worth can be attributed to each item, determined by the ranking. Error bars show 95% confidence intervals.

Table 2. Descriptions of the top 6 priorities in the preliminary ranking results. The descriptions of all the priorities can be found within the survey.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us using the contact details below.

Thank you!

Rob MacKinnon (robert.mackinnon@aru.ac.uk), Antje Heinrich (antje.heinrich@manchester.ac.uk), Chris Sumner (christian.sumner@ntu.ac.uk), Erick Gallun (gallunf@ohsu.edu)

Members of the UKAN Hearing SIG Committee

https://acoustics.ac.uk/sigs/hearing-acoustics/