Psychometric properties of four measures of noise sensitivity: A comparison

Individual noise sensitivity is a stable personality trait covering attitud es towards a wide range of environmental sounds. It is a major antecendent of noise annoyance reactions, and is assessed by obtaining responses to one or several rating-scale items. The psychometric properties of four German- language noise-sensitivity measures-a translation of Weinstein's (1978) noi se-sensitivity scale, a newly developed questionnaire, and two single-item questions reflecting susceptibility to sounds and noise, respectively-were evaluated, using a student sample of n = 213 persons. Reliability coefficie nts ranged from r = 0.70 for the rating of susceptibility to sounds to r = 0.92 for the newly constructed questionnaire. Construct validity was apprai sed by inter-correlating noise-sensitivity scores, and by relating noise-se nsitivity scores to questionnaire measures of depression, stress, anger, an d anxiety. The results indicate that, while the questionnaire measures sati sfy established criteria for test evaluation, the one-item ratings do not. Further exploratory analyses on a subset of the sample found only weak rela tionships between self-report measures of noise sensitivity and objective p erformance decrements under noise. (C) 1999 Academic Press.