The SEQAP Study: Studying the Relationships Between Air Pollution Public Perception and Pollutants Concentrations

Abstract

P-382 Abstract: Air pollution may cause cardio-respiratory diseases, and more often annoyance reactions. Despite the large populations exposed to air pollution in our cities and numerous epidemiological study demonstrating relationships between air pollution and health, few studies have been published on the quantitative relations between the exposure to pollution and the public perception of air quality. The SEQAP epidemiological study has for main objective to measure the relationships between adult perception of air pollution and air pollutants concentrations measured by monitoring networks in several French towns. 3000 subjects will be randomly selected from adults living in 7 cities having different levels of air pollutants exposure. From each city, 450 subjects aged 25–65 will be chosen. Interview will be conducted by phone, including questions on socio-demographic characteristics, occupation, smoking habits, household members, access to a car, health, plus an air pollution perception scale and a validated quality of life scale. On a sub-sample of this population, sociological interviews will be conducted in order to improve understanding of the factors shaping public perceptions. First, validation study on the an air pollution perception scale will be realized with factorial design and Rash model; then multivariate analysis will measured the relationships between the prevalence of annoyance reactions to air pollution and the level of air pollution measured in each town. In the framework of this project, we conducted two preliminary studies: (i) we first realized a typology of the 54 French cities having a air pollution monitoring network, in order to classify cities with homogeneous exposure to pollutants; (ii) we also constructed an air pollution perception verbal scale. This scale contains questions on annoyance reactions in different fields: health, daily life, local environment and quality of life. This scale is being tested on 100 subjects and first results on the validation study will be presented. This work is funded by ADEME/PRIMEQUAL (grant n° 0410C0111).