Application of Audiometric Data Base Analysis to Selected Air Force Bases

摘要

This paper focuses on using Audiometric Data Base Analysis (ADBA) to evaluate theeffectiveness of the hearing conservation program (HCP) at eight Air Force Bases. The primary goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of the HCP for all eight bases combined. The secondary goal was determining which groups of personnel are experiencing the most variability in their hearing threshold levels (HTLs). The ADBA results revealed that the total group exhibited a program that was between marginal and unacceptable. Breaking the total group's audiometric data into smaller groups did not reveal a significantly different variability by group with the exception of gender. Females had significantly less variability in their mean HTLs when compared to males. The standard deviation of differences of HTLs measure did not give similar results to the other measures. The use of the standard deviation of difference of HTLs measure is not recommended for use under the present guidelines. An overall distribution of TWAs (time weighted averages) for the total group showed a fairly normal distribution with the 50th percentile at 85 dBA (A frequency-weighted sound pressure level). The 10th percentile is 77 dBA and 90th percentile is 94 dBA for the total population. (AN).