Abstract
Response scales are widely used to assess the personal experience of sensation and perception in built environments, and have a great impact on the quality of the responses. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of response scales on human sensation and perception in moderate indoor environments. Four different response scales were compared under three room temperatures (19.0 °C, 24.5 °C, and 30.0 °C) and five acoustic stimuli (ambient noise, 42 and 61 dBA × water sounds and traffic noise): a bipolar seven-point scale according to ISO 10551:1995, a unipolar 11-point scale according to ISO/TS 15666:2003, these two scales combined for each sensory comfort assessment, and a bipolar visual analogue scale. The degree of relative differentiation based on indoor physical factors made no significant difference across the four response scales. Therefore, the effects of physical factors on human response could be assessed by using any of the four scales tested in this study, with a statistical significance at p < 0.05 in moderate environments. The choice of response scale would depend not only on the type of physical stimulus but also on the question of sensation or perception. The reliability of each response scale was different according to the subjective attributes. The bipolar visual analogue scale was subjectively preferred by the respondents.
Highlights
Our objective is to investigate effects of response scales for young adults with regard to indoor environmental sensation and perception in combined thermal and acoustic conditions
Four different response scales were compared in this study: a bipolar seven-point scale according to ISO 10551:1995 [5], a unipolar 11-point scale according to ISO/TS 15666:2003, [6] combined scale with seven-point and 11-point scales for each environment, and a bipolar visual analogue scale
The unipolar 11-point scale had the longest response time among the four scales tested in this study because the number of questions with the same content was twice that of the bipolar scales
Summary
It is common in indoor environmental quality research to collect data using subjective questionnaires. Capturing true responses regarding occupants’ comfort in and acceptance of an indoor environment is crucial when evaluating a building’s performance. The impact of the questionnaire design characteristics on the quality of the responses should be minimized to achieve true responses [1]. DeCastellarnau [1], in her latest review article, classified 23 different characteristics of response scales and provided their effects on data quality. Ten characteristics out of the 23 have been found to affect data quality: the scales’ evaluative dimensions, the types of scales, scale length, verbal labels, number of fixed reference points, order of numerical labels, correspondence between numerical and verbal labels, scale illustrative format, scale layout display, and the label visual separation
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