| Abstract: | Many aspects of community noise policies are based on information about people's reactions to noise. Studies of community response to noise can make direct contributions to public policy if a major goal is to report the effects of community and acoustical variables on annoyance in decibel equivalent units. Three other goals are of lesser importance but deserve more attention than they have received: specifying the shape of dose/response relationships, developing a ratio-level measurement technique for noise annoyance (magnitude scaling) and predicting the public's actions toward noise. Achieving these goals requires the widespread adoption of design and analysis approaches which have been only sporadically applied to the study of annoyance in communities: the calculation of the decibel equivalence of effects as well as correlation coefficients, the reporting of confidence intervals as well as statistical significance tests, the evaluation of sigmoid-shaped dose/response curves, and the evaluation of the effect of community as well as individual differences on the accuracy of the survey results. |
