Over the last two decades the U.S. Army has instituted a comprehensive
hearing conservation program (HCP) to reduce the prevalence of hearin
g loss in soldiers and civilian employees. As a component of this prog
ram, hearing threshold levels (HTLs) are stored in a central computeri
zed Army-wide hearing conservation data registry. The aim of this stud
y was to analyze the hearing threshold data to compare the hearing los
s among soldiers representing different (1) race groups, (2) noise exp
osure groups, and (3) durations of military service. HTLs were age-cor
rected using data base B values from ISO 1999 (1990). As may be expect
ed, soldiers exposed to high noise levels had significantly poorer hea
ring than the group of soldiers with limited noise exposure. On the av
erage, results indicated a significant difference in HTLs among the ra
ce groups with black soldiers having the most sensitive hearing and wh
ite soldiers having the poorest. Also, subjects with greater durations
of military service had the least sensitive hearing. Finally, race an
d years of service factors were found to interact in their effect on H
TL. The findings are discussed in terms of implications of race differ
ences, normative data, and effectiveness of the U.S. Army HCP.