We determined the natural course of voice complaints among school workers and established the risk factors associated with incidence and chronic voice complaints.
We conducted a longitudinal study with an 11-month follow-up among 682 school workers. Participants filled out a questionnaire on individual and work-related conditions and the nature and severity of voice complaints. All participants who provided baseline data were contacted in the 11-month follow-up, if they were still working in the school. Short-term environmental measurements of physical work-related factors were conducted during visits at the workplaces. Logistic regression analysis was used to determine associations between work-related factors and voice complaints.
We found a high occurrence of chronic voice complaints, a low recovery of 22%, and an annual incidence of 44%. A self-reported high noise level at the workplace was associated with the incidence of voice complaints (odds ratio = 2.45). Self-reported poor acoustics in the classroom was associated with chronic voice complaints (odds ratio = 1.76).
This unique longitudinal study among school workers presented some indications that self-reported high noise levels may contribute to the incidence of voice complaints, whereas self-reported poor acoustic conditions may be an important associated factor of chronic voice complaints.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 23 November 2016.
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#7,814,482
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Outputs from American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
#888
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#101,539
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Outputs of similar age from American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
#13
of 31 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,862,576 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 70th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,747 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 8.6. This one is in the 49th percentile – i.e., 49% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 31 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 58% of its contemporaries.
