Development of a social survey for the study of vibration annoyance in residential environments: Good practice guidance

• We provide recommendation on how to measure vibration annoyance using previously suggested scales.
• We provide recommendations for future vibration annoyance studies.
• We point out issues to be taken into account during the design stage of a vibration annoyance survey.
• We provide recommendations for analysing socio-vibration databases.
• We provide information on how to best measure and gather additional variables.

This paper outlines good practice guidelines for developing a social survey to investigate public annoyance in relation to environmental vibration. Drawing on the development of international good practice guidelines and research into noise and vibration annoyance, a number of challenges that arise in developing such a survey are addressed. The issues include the development of rating scales for annoyance and social factors, decisions regarding the terminology used in the survey to define annoyance, different sources of vibration, and how respondents’ consider the residential area of investigation when completing the survey. The process highlights the need to combine disciplines, in this case applying knowledge from social sciences and acoustics in order to ensure the collection of robust and reliable data. The final survey developed from this process was used in a national survey in the United Kingdom which aimed to produce exposure–response relationships for vibration and annoyance in relation to railway activity, construction activity, and internal vibration sources.