Voice of elementary school teachers from different educational districts

Abstract

Objective: to analyze the voice of elementary school teachers with voice complaints according to the schools they serve. Material and Methods: cross sectional design, observational, analytical approach of quantitative character, attended by 74 female teachers, aged between 20 and 62 years with a mean of 38,5 years. Data collection was composed by hearing screening and the completion of a protocol, followed by vocal auditory perceptual, acoustic analysis of glottal source and spectrographic of voice. We carried out statistical analysis using ANOVA test, adopting a significance level of 5%. Results: significant difference in favor of the municipal network in the degree of roughness and the overall degree of change in auditory perceptual voice analysis and the darkening of the trace of the high frequencies and all vocal spectrogram, the presence of noise between the harmonics and definition of harmonics in spectrographic acoustic assessment; there was no significance in the results of the acoustic analysis of glottal source. Conclusions: the group of teachers of the municipal elementary school had a worse voice quality as evidenced by the high overall degree of change of voice and hoarseness, although within normal limits, and the increased presence of noise between the harmonics, and probable hyperfunctional vocal compensation evidenced by darker than the spectrographic tracing. Municipal teachers also showed greater definition of harmonics for other school systems, but with low average, suggesting vocal inadequacy.