Parent Perceptions of Children's Leisure and the Risk of Damaging Noise Exposure†

The purpose of this study was to survey the attitudes of parents of adolescent children (with, and without, hearing impairment), with the following objectives: (1) compare perceptions of the parent groups regarding the risk of leisure-noise-related hearing injury; and (2) investigate how comfortable parents felt endorsing their child's participation in a range of everyday leisure activities, some which may involve noise exposure. Cross-sectional cohort study. Experimental group — parents of adolescents (aged 13–18 years) with hearing impairment (HI group) n = 53. Control group — parents of age-matched youths with non-impaired/‘normal hearing’ (NH group) n = 70. Rasch modelling was applied to evaluate the internal validity and reliability of the leisure attitudes items. Rasch-generated interval-level data and raw ordinal-level data were used to identify systematic differences between groups. Most parents (HI and NH groups) perceived leisure-noise to be a significant health risk for young people in ...