Design of a Retrospective Survey for Occupant Satisfaction with IEQ in Classrooms

The occupants’ satisfaction with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of a building is a key factor to determine if the indoor climate can be considered as acceptable. Current standards, evaluating the IEQ, do not always guarantee sufficiently high occupant satisfaction levels, since these standards do not handle all satisfaction influencing parameters, such as, personal preferences or perceived control.

Therefore, the assessment of occupant satisfaction with the IEQ remains an important issue. The most widespread tool for occupant satisfaction evaluation are post-occupancy evaluation (POE) surveys. However, surveys are time consuming and intrusive for participants, therefore, it is important to tailor the surveys to their specific use.

The objective of this paper is to design a retrospective survey to determine the occupants’ satisfaction with the IEQ in classrooms and evaluate the survey’s usefulness.  The retrospective survey was distributed among three classes of a secondary school questioning the 58 participants’ perception and satisfaction with the IEQ in their classroom during heating season.

Results showed that the designed retrospective survey was suitable for assessing the occupants’ perception and satisfaction with the IEQ in classrooms. The survey was able to give a general overview of the satisfaction levels in each classroom and to distinguish causes of dissatisfaction during courses in the morning or afternoon.

However, the survey could not explain the considerable discrepancy among the satisfaction score, which could be linked to occupant preferences. More in-depth analysis showed that assuming thermal satisfaction from perceptions regarding the thermal environment is inaccurate. A longitudinal monitoring of both the IEQ and occupants’ satisfaction, using on the spot surveys, in the three classrooms is required, in order to determine the occupants’ preference regarding the IEQ in the classroom.