Subjective and objective assessment of environmental and acoustical quality in schools around Istanbul Ataturk International Airport

Abstract

Air traffic noise maps have been drawn for Istanbul Ataturk International Airport. With the establishment of these maps, a study was conducted by using subjective and objective methods in order to assess the noise annoyance levels of students and teachers of schools around airport. Questionnaires and intelligibility tests were designed (with different questions for teachers and students) in order to measure the effect of noise among students and teachers as the classrooms' users. A total of seven hundred and twenty (720) students and one hundred and fourteen (114) teachers completed the questionnaire, which was mainly designed to define their ability to differentiate different noise sources (originating both internally or externally), and their annoyance levels with these noise sources. The results reveal that overall, students tend to be more annoyed than teachers; aircraft noise is considered the main external noise source and students' chatter is rated the main internal noise source for both groups. Parallel to the annoyance study, internal and external noise measurements have been carried out to provide information on typical noise levels, to which children are exposed at school. In order to evaluate the acoustical quality of classrooms, four elementary schools within a 5 km radius of the airport were selected and three acoustical parameters have been investigated: background noise level, reverberation time and sound insulation. Finally, in one of the selected school's classrooms, a two-stage improvement study was realised. Results revealed the striking effect of lower reverberation values on increasing speech intelligibility.

Validating the Turkish version of the Weinstein noise sensitivity scale: effects of age, sex, and education level

“…At the second step of the study, it was observed that the mean NSS value was 88.72 ± 17.97 for 210 volunteers, and 89. 22 (Table 5). Besides, it was observed that 30.48% of all male subjects of the study were in the upper SNS group while it was 26.67% for females (x 2 test, P > 0.05).…”

“…Although the studies presented that environmental high noise appears to be important problem in Turkey [22][23][24] and there are some noise-annoyance questionnaires adapted to Turkish [23,25] and developed in Turkish [24], noise sensitivity has never been subject to any research in the Turkish population as much as we found in the English and Turkish literature. For the measurement of SNS, long and short questionnaires have been proposed [7]; the Weinstein noise sensitivity scale (WNSS) has been one of the most widely used standard questionnaires with high validity, reliability, and internal consistency [3,4,26,27].…”

A methodology to determine appropriate façade aperture sizes considering comfort and performance criteria: A primary school classroom case

“…The materials applied in the software were first validated by a study that measured reverberation time and speech intelligibility in a refurbished classroom with the same floor, walls, windows and suspended ceiling finishing materials in Istanbul. 64 The design guide 42 recommended the use of suspended ceilings with at least 0.75 weighted sound absorption coefficient, α w .…”