An exploration of experts’ views on the relative importance of indoor-environmental quality parameters

Abstract

Indoor-environmental quality (IEQ) assessments must consider multiple aspects and domains. In this context, common IEQ building evaluation and rating schemes frequently apply conjoint indicators to aggregate these different aspects via importance or significance ranking formalisms involving, for instance, points, scores and weights. However, the reasoning for the specific selection of variables and the sources of their assigned weights are not necessarily disclosed as a matter of course. In the present contribution, we investigate one of the paths to the provision of such reasoning that leans on experts’ views. Online feedback from a small sample of IEQ experts provided the basis for the illustration of this path and the kinds of principal insights that it can offer, including the degree of consistency among experts and the potential factors that could influence their judgment. Moreover, the study also exemplified the process of deriving relative importance weightings (i.e. coefficients applied to various domain and sub-category variables) and how such processes can be applied toward a total IEQ measure. The study’s findings underscore the need to improve the transparency of the processes through which such schemes and their constitutive ingredients are arrived at.