Indoor environmental quality survey: a brief comparison between different Post Occupancy Evaluation methods GALATIOTO Alessandra 1, a * , LEONE Giuliana 2,b , MILONE Daniele 3,c , PITRUZZELLA Salvatore 4,c and FRANZITTA Vincenzo 5,c 1,2,3,5 DEIM - Dipartimento dell’Energia dell’ingegneria dell’Informazione e dei Modelli matematici, Viale delle Scienze Ed. 9, 90100 Palermo 4 Università degli Studi di Palermo, Facoltà di Architettura, Viale delle Scienze Ed. 14, 90100, Palermo a alessandra.galatioto@dream.unipa.it, b giuliana.leone@dream.unipa.it, c daniele.milone@unipa.it, d salvatore.pitruzzella@unipa.it, e franzitta@dream.unipa.it Keywords: Indoor environment evaluation; Occupants survey; Questionnaire. Abstract. Building occupants are important factor in giving information on indoor conditions such as comfort, productivity, building performance and occupants´ health. Even that, being their appraisal mainly based on subjective judgments, it is difficult to set up a standard and objective method for this purpose. The present work aimed to describe, analyze and compare the most common tests on this topic, in order to highlight critical, failings and strengths. Introduction The Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) is one of the main tasks to achieve in buildings, since it strongly influences occupant’s health, productivity, performance and comfort. This is generally noteworthy but gets highly importance in public buildings such as offices, schools, library, etc.. Although, its evaluation is very difficult since psychological, physical and environmental parameters are involved. For this reason, the “Post Occupancy Evaluation” (POE) methodology has been implementing during past decades in order to guide future architectonical design. The POE "is a systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of design components in the built environment from the occupants’ point of view" [1]. Generally, it provides a method of collecting and diffusing data on existing building that have been occupied for a certain period and is of great interest for everyone involved in the life cycle of a building from the refurbishment designer to the occupants and includes different research topics: thermal comfort, relationship between comfort and indoor/outdoor temperature; users’ influence by the control of air temperatures and humidity, lightning and acoustic quality [2-4]; the Sick Building Syndrome (SBS), etc.. Hence goals, strategies, approaches and methodologies for carrying out POE are still focus of many researches, directing overall to the common used tool: questionnaires whose importance is then extremely relevant; the more the questions are target to the specific goal and easy to understand for public, the more it will be useful. Usually, the evaluation strategies for indoor quality assessment follow three methods: the first one is merely aimed to measure the physical parameters, related to indoor environment; the second one, the faster and the most economic, involves directly the users and their physical and psychological satisfaction; the third one tends to integrate both the previous approaches [5,6]. Yet in Italy, the POE approach has been applied mainly on public buildings, it is worth noticed that these edifices sometimes have also an historical value; in such conditions, occupant’s comfort and safety are not easy to be guaranteed according to the building intended use; therefore, the POE has to count on these facts and could be guide Local Administration to assign the appropriate function to their historical buildings Advanced Materials Research Vols. 864-867 (2014) pp 1148-1152 Online available since 2013/Dec/13 at www.scientific.net © (2014) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland doi:10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.864-867.1148 All rights reserved. No part of contents of this paper may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of TTP, www.ttp.net. (ID: 147.163.19.155-16/12/13,18:43:29)