(1) Acceptability of the HEAR-aware App
listening situation-induced snippets
EMA
Only 8% of participants met the intended usage of adding ≥1.5 listening situations a day, resulting in 42 snippets in total across the 4-week intervention period. The average participant added about half of that volume (i.e., M = 23.7). Although this number might be an underestimation as half of the sample underreported difficult listening situations because of the COVID-19 lockdown circumstances, the observed compliance seems generally in line with other EMA research (Low satisfaction with the snippets’ usefulness may have limited the compliance somewhat (see further later). In addition, we found anecdotal evidence for other reasons directly or indirectly leading to underreporting of listening situations, in the free text field at the end of the T3 questionnaire (e.g., “I became sloppy with filling out surveys because they became repetitive,” and “The app gave no direct feedback on my responses in the surveys”). In contrast, the relative usage compliance criteria 2 and 3a (i.e., ≥80% of listening situations evaluated and listening situation-induced snippets viewed, respectively) showed higher satisfactory acceptability. Compliance rates for these criteria were 85% and 40% of the participants, respectively, suggesting that once participants had added listening situations and received snippets, they were generally inclined to take the next steps (i.e., evaluation of listening situations, and viewing the offered snippets). It should be noted that there was some uncertainty about whether snippets were actually viewed as we used a proxy measure of viewing (i.e., it was only certain that the snippet was reviewed, and thus, opened).