On the study of the effects of sea views, greenery views and personal characteristics on noise annoyance perception at homes

Noise annoyance has caused significant adverse impacts on human beings and numerous efforts have been spent on mitigating annoyance problems. Natural greenery has been shown to be able to moderate annoyance problems at home but this conclusion was drawn without properly controlling the potential confounding factors. Furthermore, few have explored the moderation effect of a sea view. Accordingly, this study formulated a multivariate model to examine the impacts of natural views as well as personal characteristics on annoyance perception. A housing estate was selected in Hong Kong as the survey site for which some of the residents were exposed to greenery views, sea views, or both from their homes. Eight hundred and sixty-one responses were collected via questionnaire surveys and analyzed using an ordered logit model. The results suggest that both a greenery view and a sea view can moderate annoyance responses. Several individual's personal characteristics are found to affect individuals' annoyance perception. The duration of time spent daily at home is shown to have an influence on the moderation impact exerted by a greenery view, while the age of an individual is shown to have an influence on noise moderation effect exerted by a sea view. (C) 2012 Acoustical Society of America. [DOI: 10.1121/1.3681936]