Community Response to High-Energy Impulsive Sounds: An Assessment of the Field Since 1981 (1996)

As summarized in Table 5, social surveys differ from controlled-exposure field studies (whether conducted in laboratory or field settings) in a number of ways that impede direct comparisons of the data collected in the two types of studies. It is useful to keep these differences in mind when developing a dosage-response relationship for predicting community response on the basis of a combination of information from the two types of studies.

Estimates of the annoyance of individual sounds as judged in controlled-exposure studies and of the prevalence of noise-induced annoyance in a community are both derived from information about the relative frequencies of occurrence of self-reports of annoyance, based on a pooling of the opinions of either (a) test subjects about the immediate annoyance of individual test signals or (b) survey respondents about the long-term annoyance of their neighborhood noise environment. The similarity in the pooling of annoyance judgments does not constitute a logical link between the probability that a single noise intrusion will lead to an individual's report of annoyance in some degree (as in a controlled-exposure study) and the proportion of residents highly annoyed by cumulative noise exposure in a community (as in a social survey).

Probabilities of individual reports of high annoyance to controlled signal presentations are inferred from the relative frequencies of judgments of the an