More than a decade has passed since a relationship between community noise exposure and the prevalence of annoyance was synthesized by Schultz [T. J. Schultz, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 64, 377–405 (1978)] from the findings of a dozen social surveys. This quantitative dosage–effect relationship has been adopted as a standard means for predicting noise-induced annoyance in environmental assessment documents. The present effort updates the 1978 relationship with findings of social surveys conducted since its publication. Although the number of data points from which a new relationship was inferred more than tripled, the 1978 relationship still provides a reasonable fit to the data.
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Fidell et al. (1991) studied this question.