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Suggested Citation:"1 Executive Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2014. Research Methods for Understanding Aircraft Noise Annoyances and Sleep Disturbance. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/22352.
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Suggested Citation:"1 Executive Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2014. Research Methods for Understanding Aircraft Noise Annoyances and Sleep Disturbance. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/22352.
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Suggested Citation:"1 Executive Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2014. Research Methods for Understanding Aircraft Noise Annoyances and Sleep Disturbance. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/22352.
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Suggested Citation:"1 Executive Summary." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2014. Research Methods for Understanding Aircraft Noise Annoyances and Sleep Disturbance. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/22352.
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1 Executive Summary This report presents the final documentation for the two parts of this ACRP 02-35 project. This executive summary addresses first the aircraft noise annoyance survey tasks, and second, the sleep disturbance effort. Then, Sections 2 through 10 describe the annoyance survey methodology that was developed and applied and the results relevant to the goals of the study. Section 12 examines airport-community relations. Section 13 lists the references cited in the discussion of annoyance. Sections 14 through 17 present the final sleep disturbance study designs and the budget estimates for each type of study. Section 17 presents the references cited in the discussion of the sleep study design. Appendices provide materials referenced throughout the report. 1.1 Annoyance The first phase of this ACRP Study included collection of data for the purpose of testing an aircraft noise annoyance survey that can be used in a national study to update the dose-response relationship between noise exposure and the percentage of people who are highly annoyed. Two modes for collecting the survey responses were tested. 1. The first mode was a telephone interview, in which respondents were asked 49 questions about themselves, their level of annoyance due to aircraft noise and other potential irritants such as road traffic noise. The telephone survey also asked about views on the actions of local airport officials for controlling aircraft noise. 2. The second mode used a shorter mail questionnaire containing the questions about level of annoyance due to aircraft noise and a much smaller number of potential irritants. The main goals of the annoyance portion of this study were to: • Compare response rates and yield for the mail and telephone surveys, and • Evaluate whether the relationship between percent highly annoyed (HA) and aircraft noise exposure differs for the two survey modes. Four different survey designs were reviewed: 1) in-person, 2) telephone, 3) mail and 4) web-based. In- person interviews give the highest data quality, response rate, ability to select the respondents and permit the greatest complexity of the questionnaire. However, the cost of the in-person interviews was judged too high for practical implementation, especially for the ultimate national survey. A web survey may be the least expensive, but it requires access to the internet, cannot very well control who responds to the survey, and may not be able to yield sufficient respondents across all noise exposures of interest. Unlike many large social surveys, this annoyance survey requires that subjects be chosen based on their location / noise exposure level and that, to the extent possible, the sample sizes at different exposure levels should be approximately equal. This rough equality ensures that a dose-response curve may be developed with roughly equal confidence bounds across all noise exposures of interest. Based on team experience and the literature review, the decision was made to conduct both a telephone and a mail survey at each airport for the purpose of comparing the responses to both survey modes. A literature review identified best practices for the design of the survey instruments and determined what policy-relevant issues could be addressed from this design’s strengths. Sixty-two survey topics were identified in the noise literature as were the types of data needed to address these topics. The topics most likely to succeed were chosen and a survey instrument developed. The basic noise annoyance response question was selected for use in both the mail and the telephone surveys see Figure 1. A full questionnaire developed for the telephone survey is included in Appendix A. 1

Figure 1 Basic Aircraft Noise Annoyance Question Three airports agreed to be airports where the test surveys could be conducted. These airports were chosen because they are located in different geographic areas and climates. For each airport, annual day-night average noise exposure (DNL) contours were computed and five noise exposure strata used to select candidate respondents: 50-55 dB, 55-60 dB, 60-65 dB, 65-70 dB and over 70 dB. The goal was to attempt to survey a total of 6,580 addresses, 2,193 per airport or approximately 439 in each DNL noise stratum. Two airports were surveyed first, so that the third survey could benefit from any lessons learned at the first two. For the initial two airports, residential locations and associated addresses were selected to reflect this distribution, in so far as was possible, and the resultant addresses were divided generally as shown in Figure 2 (more detail in Section 5). After the initial division, the addresses selected for the telephone survey were associated with telephone numbers. Increasingly, 2

telephone numbers cannot be found for addresses and specific mailings are required to solicit phone numbers. Figure 2 Division of Selected Addresses Among Survey Methods Once all interviews / survey responses were complete, detailed noise metrics were computed for each respondent location, and responses associated with the location’s noise exposure in terms of DNL, as computed by FAA’s Integrated Noise Model (INM). The major findings from the analysis of the data are: • Response rates for the mail survey are much higher than those for the telephone survey (35.1% vs. 12.1%). • There is no evidence that the response of percentage highly annoyed differs between the telephone and mail surveys. • Statistical tests showed no significant difference overall between the mail and telephone surveys in percent highly annoyed. • Respondents to the survey are disproportionately likely to be white non-Hispanic and age 50 or more, when compared with census figures, although the differences from the census are greater for the telephone survey than for the mail survey. Among the respondents to the survey, however, there is no statistically significant relationship, after accounting for the level of noise exposure and airport-to-airport differences, between these demographic characteristics and annoyance. 1.2 Sleep Disturbance The main objectives of Phase II, the sleep disturbance portion of ACRP Project 02-35 are: • Develop at least two general research protocols to improve the understanding of the relationship between aircraft noise and sleep disturbance in a field setting, and • Identify criteria to be used to test and evaluate the protocols. The evaluation criteria should include, but not be limited to, cost, time, data quantity, quality, and validity, administrative effort, and comparability with previous and future studies. The suggestions for conducting sleep disturbance research (Section 15) are based on both the literature review (summarized in Section 14) and recommendations developed by Dr. Basner in PARTNER Project All Addresses Telephone survey (1/2, randomized) Valid matching telephone number Notification letter, $2 No valid matching telephone number Phone number request, $2 Mail survey (1/2, randomized) Cover letter, $2, mail survey instrument 3

25B. In PARTNER Project 25B, Dr. Basner developed an optimal study design for a possible U.S. field study on the effects of aircraft noise on sleep. The research protocols described in this summary are consistent with the findings of PARTNER Project 25B, and those findings that are relevant for the Sleep Disturbance Study Plan, Section 15, will be discussed here. However, the reader is also referred to the Year 1 report of PARTNER Project 25B [1]1 and to two publications that resulted from this work.[2,3] It should be stressed that, in general, there is no optimal study design that maximizes all the desirable attributes of a study. Rather, every decision will influence some study aspects positively and others negatively. What is considered "optimal" largely depends on the goal of the specific study. For the United States, current, precise, and valid exposure-response relationships between acoustical properties of single aircraft noise events (e.g., maximum sound pressure level or Sound Exposure Level, SEL) and physiological reactions (e.g., awakenings) are needed to inform policy and legislation. Precision requires the investigation of a large enough sample of subjects exposed to a large enough number of aircraft noise events. Power calculations inform how large these numbers need to be. Sample sizes need to avoid being either too small (relevant effect cannot be detected) or too large (additional funds could have been allocated for another study). Validity requires that the measurement of both the acoustical exposure and the physiological response are measured correctly and can be interpreted in a meaningful way. Additionally, the investigated subjects need to be representative of the population of interest for the results to be externally valid. The two general research protocols discussed in Section 15.1 (Polysomnography or Actigraphy plus ECG) will be identical in aspects related to the selection of measurement sites, study population, acoustical measurements, and supplementary data gathered, as we think that the strategies identified here could be described as optimal. The two research protocols, will, however, differ in the methodology used to measure sleep. As explained below in Section 17, this will primarily affect the staffing level needed to collect the physiological data in the field and to analyze the data afterwards. The per subject costs will thus be higher for polysomnography, which will limit the maximum number of investigated subjects at the same level of funding. How the different methods affect staffing levels and funding will thus be explained in detail in the budget section of this report. The two protocols are outlined in Section 15.1. 1 Numbers in brackets [ ] refer to Sleep References in Section 18. 4

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TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Web-Only Document 17: Research Methods for Understanding Aircraft Noise Annoyances and Sleep Disturbance explores the development and validation of a research protocol for a large-scale study of aircraft noise exposure-annoyance response relationships across the U.S. The report also highlights alternative research methods for field studies to assess the relationship between aircraft noise and sleep disturbance for U.S. airports.

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