THE CONCEPT OF NOISE ANNOYANCE: HOW INTERNATIONAL EXPERTS SEE IT
✍ Scribed by R. Guski; U. Felscher-Suhr; R. Schuemer
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 187 KB
- Volume
- 223
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-460X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The ®rst part of this paper is a review of some de®nitions of noise annoyance which have been used explicitly or implicitly in major ®eld and laboratory studies in dierent countries. This analysis shows wide dierences. For instance, in some cases annoyance is seen as an outcome of disturbances, in other cases it is seen as an indication of the degree of helplessness with respect to the noise source. The second part is a report of an empirical study in which 68 noise research experts from seven dierent nations were asked (1) to indicate the main eect of noise, and (2) to rate the similarity between the concept noise annoyance'' and several related concepts. It turned out that (1) noise annoyance is seen as the major eect of noise, (2) that noise annoyance is a multi-faceted psychological concept, including behavioral, and evaluative aspects. Also, (3) the two aspects rated highest in similarity to annoyance are nuisance'' and ``disturbance'', (4) although noise annoyance must be related to acoustic variables, acoustic characteristics do not play an overwhelming role in the concept of annoyance and (5) although experts from dierent languages agree upon the main components of the annoyance concept (e.g., nuisance, disturbance, and unpleasantness), there are some signi®cant dierences in the weights English, German, and Japanese speaking experts assign to several components (e.g., to nuisance, interference, irritation, and vexation). Whether these dierent weights are due to dierent concepts of annoyance, or due to dierent connotations of the related words in the respective languages, could not be analyzed with the data at hand.