Occupants' indoor environmental quality satisfaction factors as measures of school teachers' well-being

Most studies that investigated the impact of buildings' indoor environmental quality (IEQ) focused on office buildings, with those studying schools focusing on the impact on students' well-being rather than teachers'. Additionally, most of these studies limited their assessment of well-being to occupants' satisfaction with IEQ factors (e.g. thermal comfort and lighting), overlooking essential aspects related to psychological, social, and physical well-being. This paper presents results of a study conducted in 32 schools in Manitoba, Canada, to investigate the extent to which occupants' IEQ satisfaction factors can be used as measures of teachers psychological, social, and physical well-being. The study involved adapting, deploying and refining an existing IEQ satisfaction survey; and developing, deploying, refining and validating three new surveys to evaluate teachers' psychological, social and physical well-being in schools. Three existing validated well-being surveys in the literature for assessing generic psychological, social and physical well-being were also deployed with the other surveys to teachers in the 32 schools. The association analyses between these different surveys found ventilation and thermal comfort to be the most significant measure of teachers' physical well-being with moderately positive correlations, while lighting and acoustics and privacy were insignificant measures of well-being, thus reinforcing the need to distinguish between occupants' IEQ satisfaction and their well-being in future research. The newly developed well-being surveys include some factors not found in the existing generic well-being surveys and are therefore likely to produce the most representative assessment of teachers' well-being for detailed IEQ impact investigation.