Psychoacoustics Survey Results: Psychological Factors Affecting Noise Distraction

From an literature review of psychoacoustics, exploring how factors such as personality impact on the perception of noise and affects distraction from noise in the office. An on-line survey was conducted to test the hypotheses generated by the literature review conducted by Oseland and Hodsman. The primary objective of the survey was to test whether personality types, in particular extroversion, affect noise perception and distraction. The survey explored the relationship between noise distraction metrics and key variables such as personality, work activities, primary workplace, acoustic design, the ability to screen noise and demographics. We received 516 valid responses, providing a valid sample size for analysis. The survey included 44 sub-questions used to determine the respondents' personality profile on the Big Five Inventory (BFI), also known as OCEAN, as it determines the strength of five personality factors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. The respondents were sub-grouped into three categories, on each personality factor, to represent those with low, medium and high scores relative to the other respondents. When asked how noise affects the ability to work, three-quarters of our respondents reported that they are negatively affected by the noise in their workplace.