Assessing Overall Indoor Environmental Comfort and Satisfaction: Evaluation of a Questionnaire Proposal by Means of Statistical Analysis of Responses

Considering all aspects of indoor environmental comfort (thermal, visual, acoustical and air quality) and their interactions, questionnaires aiming at detecting assess people's perception of indoor environmental quality (IEQ), well-being and satisfaction should be designed in a more homogeneous way. In particular, the choice of the questions, response options and scales adopted must satisfy consistency criteria between different IEQ areas, but also allow a direct correlation to specific measurable quantities. In this work, the design of a comprehensive questionnaire is presented for assessment of overall IEQ in educational buildings. Its ability to effectively describe users’ sensation, preference, comfort and satisfaction for all four IEQ domains (thermal, visual, acoustic and air quality) is evaluated in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and resolution, using experiments and statistical analysis. The analysis shows the agreement of mean votes with environmental parameters, correlations between sensation, comfort, satisfaction in each IEQ domain, and the relationship between scales and distributions of votes in each domain.