Current state of knowledge: outcomes research in children with mild to severe hearing impairment--approaches and methodological considerations.

This paper will provide a backdrop to the others in this section on outcomes of children with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Our objective here is to provide an overview of the research approaches used to study the outcomes of these children to provide guidance for future studies of children with mild to severe sensorineural hearing impairment (HI). During the past 20 yr there has been a gradual coalescence of research practices concerned with examining outcomes. Those who have done this work have come from different disciplines and in many cases were motivated by different circumstances. As a result, terminology and perspectives on outcomes research often still bears the features of these different disciplines and objectives of this research. This paper is an effort to provide the reader with an overview of this research endeavor that will highlight the diversity of the work being conducted on outcomes but also emphasizes the common properties. This overview will emphasize the kinds of research questions that are asked in this area of research and the associated evidence obtained to address these research questions. After this initial section there will be a consideration of the methodological issues that need to be considered, particularly for outcome research in children with HI.