This dissertation investigates Danish hearing health care and the rehabilitation of working-age people with onset hearing impairment. The focus is on the structure and function of Danish hearing health care and its impact on the hearing impaired, in terms of their experiences of the impairment and their conduct in relation to the rehabilitation service offered. The dissertation is based on a report from the Danish National Centre for Social Research (SFI) on the effect of reduced hearing on labour-market attachment and working life, which raises the ostensible issues that there is a large group who seem reluctant to acknowledge their hearing impairment, and that many hearing-impaired persons do not continue to use hearing aids after the fitting, and that those who do use
them continue to report communication difficulties in everyday life. By considering audiological rehabilitation from different qualitative sociological perspectives, the dissertation brings new insights into the continuing paucity of sociological literature around hearing disability, and into the construction of hearing disability and hearing disabled identities in clinical settings.

In the dissertation, I present five articles that explore the research question in different ways. The articles are based on empirical data constructed by means of text analyses, observations, and interviews at two public hearing clinics in Denmark.