Do Quiet Areas Afford Greater Health-Related Quality of Life than Noisy Areas?

Daniel Shepherd,David Welch,Kim Dirks,David Mcbride

doi:10.3390/ijerph10041284

Abstract

People typically choose to live in quiet areas in order to safeguard their health and wellbeing. However, the benefits of living in quiet areas are relatively understudied compared to the burdens associated with living in noisy areas. Additionally, research is increasingly focusing on the relationship between the human response to noise and measures of health and wellbeing, complementing traditional dose-response approaches, and further elucidating the impact of noise and health by incorporating human factors as mediators and moderators. To further explore the benefits of living in quiet areas, we compared the results of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) questionnaire datasets collected from households in localities differentiated by their soundscapes and population density: noisy city, quiet city, quiet rural, and noisy rural. The dose-response relationships between noise annoyance and HRQOL measures indicated an inverse relationship between the two. Additionally, quiet areas were found to have higher mean HRQOL domain scores than noisy areas. This research further supports the protection of quiet locales and ongoing noise abatement in noisy areas.

Highlights

The protection of living environments is for the public good and a legitimate aim of a democratic society
This study examines the relationship between health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and the acoustic environment, with results replicating previous findings of Dratva et al [23] that noise-induced annoyance is both prevalent in areas characterised by unnatural soundscapes and negatively related to HRQOL
Of those reporting no annoyance to transportation noise, the vast proportion were in the two rural areas, while fifteen percent of the noisy city sample indicated that they were very annoyed with transportation noise, a figure that concords to European estimates indicating that between 10% and 35% of city dwellers are severely annoyed or very annoyed by road traffic noise [23,35,36,37]

Summary

Introduction

The protection of living environments is for the public good and a legitimate aim of a democratic society. Scientific research into the harmful effects of noise exposure is ongoing [2,3,4], and adopting the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) definition of noise, Article 8 can be interpreted as a right of individuals to be protected from noise unnecessarily intruding into their home environments. The EU’s noise directive (2002/49/EC) combines both approaches, being established to protect people from harmful noise, and to identify and guard areas considered quiet. The absence of human-generated sounds may be quantified in terms of percentage-time inaudible [10], useful when considering greenbelt, life-style, or rural areas, in which sound pressure measures (e.g., dB(A)) provide inadequate representations of soundscapes [11]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion