Occupant acceptance as a screening parameter for indoor environmental assessments

摘要

Purpose - This study seeks to investigate the usefulness of occupant acceptance as a preliminaryrnscreen measure for offices' indoor air quality (IAQ). An effective alert indication of IAQ problems of arnconcerned indoor environment would help to promote good IAQ.rnDesign/methodology/approach - The study evaluates the hypothesis that the occupantrndissatisfaction with the overall indoor environment provides an indication of IAQ problems. Hence,rnoccupant dissatisfaction would be used as a screening parameter to identify problematic IAQrnregarding some IAQ criteria in subsequent IAQ assessments. The hypothesis was tested with arndatabase of regional cross-sectional measurement in 490 offices within Hong Kong.rnFindings - The occupants' dissatisfaction with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) wasrncorrelated with the IAQ assessment results of nine IAQ assessment parameters regarding some IAQrncriteria for air-conditioned offices. At certain screening levels of predicted IEQ dissatisfaction, thernperformance of the proposed screening tool, indicating unsatisfactory office IAQ, was evaluated inrnterms of the test sensitivity, specificity, predictive values and Yule's Q statistics. The results showedrnthat occupants' response to the indoor environment produced indications of unsatisfactory IAQrnregarding the requirement of an "Excellent" office.rnResearch limitations/implications - The subjective feelings of occupants are capable ofrnidentifying marked indoor environmental problems, but cannot identify the "marginal" IAQ problemrncases.rnPractical implications - The study shows the usefulness of using occupant acceptance to identifyrnthe unrecognized IAQ problems for air-conditioned office environment. Using the identification modelrndeveloped in the study, all the suspected cases were associated with a high chance of IAQrndissatisfaction and subsequent IAQ assessments were thus recommended.rnOriginality/value - The paper proposes a new identification method to identify the unrecognizedrnIAQ problems which may indicate unsatisfactory IAQ. Also, the occupants' responses on the indoorrnenvironment are quantified.