| This dissertation is about satisfaction/dissatisfaction with thermal conditions in office work settings. Thermal comfort continues to be a contentious matter for some who work in offices. It is also one element in precipitating, perhaps confounding, the so-called building-related occupant complaint syndrome (BROCS).;Logistic regression was used to stepwise develop topical subset models. Then an integrated model of those variables that survived the subset process was developed. Specifications for accepting/rejecting variables became higher as variables were dropped and new models tested. The last integrated model used p ;Variables in the last integrated model: sex; age (10-year cohorts); specific building; job satisfaction (1 of 7 job stressor indexes); three air quality/comfort clusters; having a runny nose and having chills; being too dusty; plus two global workstation evaluations,;Important findings: that sex and age are clearly associated with office thermal satisfaction/dissatisfaction; that thermal comfort has multifactorial associations with workstation environment, job stressors, health symptoms, and air quality/comfort variables, but not job duties, type of office space/sharing, headaches and most BROCS symptoms, smoking status, "going outside for fresh air," etc.;In 1989 in Washington, DC, more than 8,000 employees of the Madison Building of the Library of Congress and the headquarters' buildings of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were asked to respond to an indoor air quality and work environment survey. Eighty-four percent responded; from the responses, an "office" database of 5,981 (88 percent of returned surveys) was created. The self-reported survey included questions about the respondent's health and well-being; the workstation physical environment; comfort, air quality, and environmental exposures; the job, job stressors, and other psychosocial measures; and demographic characteristics. Of the several hundred possible variables and indexes, 75 were tested against a measure of thermal satisfaction/dissatisfaction derived from a question seeking the frequency of desiring to adjust the temperature at the workstation. |
