CAPTURING POLICY IN HEARING-AID DECISIONS BY AUDIOLOGISTS

Two studies are reported that together demonstrate that a rigorous protocol of cue elicitation employing behavioral observations of actual clinical behavior can be rewarded with powerful policy capturing in social judgement theory experiments. The decision policies of 16 clinical audiologists were derived in a study of the decision to recommend hearing-aid amplification. Using discriminant function analysis for each judge, the percentage correct classification rates for the hearing-aid recommendation criterion variable for all judges were high, with an average correct rate of 89.9%, despite widely divergent recommendation rates (21.4% to 87.1%) associated with individual decision behaviors.