Abstract
The use of different noise annoyance scales across studies and socio-acoustic surveys, in particular the popular 5-point verbal and 11-point numerical scales, has made the evaluation, comparison, and pooling of noise annoyance responses among studies a taxing issue. This is particularly the case when “high annoyance” (HA) responses need to be compared and when the original studies used different scales; thus, there are different so-called cutoff points that define the part of the scale that indicates the HA status. This paper provides practical guidance on pooling and comparing the respective annoyance data in both the linear and logistic regression context in a statistically adequate manner. It caters to researchers who want to carry out pooled analyses on annoyance data that have been collected on different scales or need to compare exposure–HA relationships between the 5-point and 11-point scales. The necessary simulation of a cutoff point non-native to an original scale can be achieved with a random assignment approach, which is exemplified in the paper using original response data from a range of recent noise annoyance surveys. A code example in the R language is provided for easy implementation of the pertinent procedures with one’s own survey data. Lastly, the not insignificant limitations of combining and/or comparing responses from different noise annoyance scales are discussed.
Highlights
Noise annoyance can be defined as a multifaceted cognitive, affective, and behavioral response to noise [1]
Two scales have become increasingly popular: the 5-point verbal and the 11-point numerical annoyance scales that were recommended by the International Commission on Biological Effects of Noise (ICBEN) in 2001 [2]
In this paper’s first part, we presented rules for converting annoyance response data that originate from different response scales to a unified scale from 0 to 100 points in order to be able to pool annoyance scores and compare resulting linear exposure–annoyance relationships
Summary
Noise annoyance can be defined as a multifaceted cognitive, affective, and behavioral response to noise [1]. Concerning the 5-point verbal scale, ICBEN’s recommendation is to use the upper two categories (the verbal marks “very” and “extremely”) as indicators of “high annoyance.”. This corresponds to a cutoff point at 60%. No recommendation is provided for the 11-point scale, according to common practice, the upper three points on the numerical scale (8, 9, 10) are regarded as indicating “high annoyance” in the respondent. In this case, the cutoff point lies at 72.73% (cf [5]). In the second statistically and computationally more complex part, it will be demonstrated how to pool and compare logistic exposure-response relationships for %HA in which the original surveys used different scales and, different cutoff points for the definition of HA
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