Proposal of fundamental items for social survey on noise problems

Social survey is a useful tool to examine the effect of noise on people in daily life situations. Social survey is an essential approach to estimate the permissible level of noise in living environment. However, it needs much effort and cost to conduct a social survey. Moreover, it is not easy to retest the survey as often done in laboratory experiments. If social surveys conducted in various places can be compared with each other, it gives useful information. It is also necessary to compare the results with those of other surveys in order to examine the validity of the survey. For this purpose it is required that common items are included in the social surveys to be compared. The committee of the social survey on noise problems was organized by the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ) in order to examine the comparability of social surveys. The Committee proposed fundamental items for a questionnaire that can be used commonly in social surveys in Japanese in 1992 [1] after preliminary surveys conducted in seven research organizations which the committee members belonged to. The English version of the questionnaire was published in 1996 [2]. © 2010 The Acoustical Society of Japan.