Analysis of Spanish adjectives to develop a Likert scale useful for studies of urban noise annoyance

Abstract

The present work describes the development and analysis of a Spanish annoyance scale for use in community noise assessments. The use of different descriptors and intervals for different authors prevents comparing studies of assessment of noise reactions. It is not clear how many semantic distinctions can be made to describe subjective reactions to noise. There is also great variability in language use reflecting educational, social class, regional, and subcultural differences. Finally, scaling annoyance responses, when the considered intervals are not equally distributed, may seriously distort results when analyzed with parametric statistics. Using three different questions, almost 400 subjects were asked to rate 25 different Spanish descriptors of annoyance. Our attempt to produce a Spanish standardized annoyance scale with descriptors marking clear semantic distinctions, roughly equidistant from each other, and having wide acceptability is presented here. Taking into account that Spanish is the official language in 21 countries and it is spoken by more than 300 million people, one of our goals in this meeting is to discuss our method and try to generalize it in order to obtain a real, universal Spanish annoyance scale.