Targeted occupant surveys: A novel method to effectively relate occupant feedback with environmental conditions

Occupant satisfaction surveys are widely used in laboratory and field
research studies of indoor environmental quality. Field studies pose
several challenges because researchers usually have no control over the
indoor environments experienced by building occupants, it is difficult to
recruit and retain participants, and data collection methods can be
cumbersome. With this in mind, we developed a survey platform that uses
real-time feedback to send targeted occupant surveys (TOS) at specific
indoor environmental conditions and stops sending survey requests when
collected responses reach the maximum surveys required. We performed a
pilot study of the TOS platform with occupants of a radiant heated and
cooled building to target survey responses at 16 radiant slab surface
(infrared) temperatures evenly distributed from 15 to 30 °C. We developed
metrics and ideal datasets to compare the TOS platform against other
occupant survey distribution methods. The results show that this novel
method has a higher approximation to characteristics of an ideal dataset;
41% compared to 23%, 19%, and 12% of other datasets in previous field
studies. Our TOS method minimizes the number of times occupants are
surveyed and ensures a more complete and balanced dataset. This allows
researchers to more efficiently and reliably collect subjective data for
occupant satisfaction studies.