PURPOSE: to typify the symptoms related to voice and its production self-referred by teachers, whose voices were identified as healthful in the Speech-Language Pathology evaluation. METHODS: 36 teachers took part, with mean age of 37 years, singles (75%) and college degree (83.33%), from the county school system of a city from the countryside of São Paulo. The teachers answered a questionnaire and referred the alteration; their voices were recorded and submitted to the perceptual Speech-Language Pathology evaluation and afterwards, both types of evaluation were compared. The socio-demographic characterization proceeded, environmental and organizational conditions of the teacher's work and their symptoms typified and submitted to a statistical analysis. RESULTS: the presence of dust (91.67%), noise (75%), excess of work (88.88%), lack of time to develop the activities at school (88.88%) and constant performance monitoring (33.33%) were noted. As for the voice, the alteration has been noted for more than four years (30.56%), secondary to its intensive use (94.44%) and to stress (61.11%), classified as moderate (66.67%), being prominent like auditory symptoms, hoarseness and tiredness of speaking, both with 69.44% and classified as proprioceptive symptoms, throat clearing (63.88%) and dry throat (61.11%). The comparison among the symptoms shows that the proprioceptive ones (63.26%) were more mentioned than the auditory ones (36.73%). CONCLUSION: the teachers work in health and voice adverse environment; the prevalence of proprioceptive symptoms was greater than the auditory ones, a fact that may have interfered in the perceptual evaluation of their voices by the Speech-Language Pathologists who just counted on the auditory clue.
Occupational Health; Voice; Voice Disorders; Faculty; Voice Quality
