Abstract
Objective:
People are often resistant to hearing-health education messages such as those aimed at the prevention of noise-induced hearing loss. This resistance may be due to psychological distance: the perceived relevance of hearing and awareness of sound to daily life. The soundscape is the internal, perceptual, experience of a sound environment. The objective of this study was to explore people’s thought processes when completing a questionnaire designed to assess the soundscape and, in particular, to investigate whether the experience reduced psychological distance of sound and their hearing.
Design:
Semi-structured interviews and qualitative data analysis.
Setting:
Questionnaires were completed on personal phones in any environment participants wished. Interviews were conducted via online video connection.
Method:
A soundscape questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of adult volunteers who were then interviewed about the experience of completing it, and how doing so had influenced their views of sound and their hearing.
Results:
Themes in three main areas were identified: the questions, which were found to be challenging but interesting; the soundscape, and the insights of participants about their own soundscape experience; and participants’ new awareness of sound and their own hearing.
Conclusion:
The findings provide interesting feedback about the meaning of responses to the questionnaire and on how people thought while using it. Furthermore, the findings imply that bringing the soundscape to a person’s conscious awareness may successfully reduce psychological distance for them about their hearing and may, therefore, be a useful preliminary to hearing-health education interventions.
Introduction
Hearing provides us with information crucial in flourishing and in survival (Van den Bosch et al., 2018). Our hearing constantly monitors the environment, and stimuli of importance can capture our attention. Hearing depends on a complex auditory system that is necessarily delicate and highly tuned and is, therefore, vulnerable to injury from high levels of sound (Wang et al., 2002). Surprisingly, people have a tendency to put their hearing at risk, either in workplaces (Lie et al., 2016; Reddy et al., 2012) or during leisure activities (Beach et al., 2013; Welch and Fremaux, 2017a; Welch and Fremaux, 2017b), even when told of the dangers and provided with training in how to avoid them (Kelly et al., 2015; Welch et al., 2019a).
Interventions for the prevention of noise-induced hearing loss in humans have focussed on education and the development of self-efficacy to avoid the dangers of noise (Martin et al., 2013). The effectiveness of such approaches may be limited by the ‘psychological distance’ of the threat to those who are noise exposed. Psychological distance refers to the perceived distance in terms of social, temporal, physical and conceptual dimensions (Trope and Liberman, 2010). A short session in which a Health and Safety officer trains a group of workers explaining how the ear can be injured, the repercussions of hearing loss, and the steps workers can take to protect themselves would be psychologically distant because of
Social distance. Since workers are likely not to know the presenter very well, or to regard them as socially close to themselves.
Temporal distance. Since the effects of noise-induced hearing loss occur over many years of exposure, and significant hearing losses are unlikely to occur until late-middle-age.
Conceptual distance. Because the workings of the ear and the pathological mechanisms that lead to noise-related injury are extremely complex, the information will be hard to conceptualise clearly for the workers.
A good presentation can attempt to minimise these distances through a variety of means, and it has been pointed out that more engaging approaches are generally more effective in health and safety training (Bhandari et al., 2019; Burke et al., 2006). A fundamental difficulty may exist, however, if at a cultural level there is a tendency to minimise the value of our hearing and the risk of hearing loss; this may represent a general psychological distance between people and sound, and the sense of hearing itself.
The soundscape (Schafer, 1977) is the internal, perceptual experience of the sound environment (Axelsson et al., 2010; Pijanowski et al., 2011). It has been shown to include a combination of the qualia of the sound environment and the affective response to it (Welch et al., 2021). A Soundscape Questionnaire (SSQ) has been developed, based on creatively written responses to sound environments (Welch et al., 2019b). A key underlying design principle was that, for most people, active vocabulary is much smaller than passive vocabulary (Laufer, 1998); in other words, people can understand more words than they normally use. This may make it difficult for a person to describe a soundscape without prompting but, if offered a set of descriptors, people can understand them well enough to respond to them, even if some are rather unusual.
Through a thematic analysis of the creative writing about sound environments described above, a set of 17 items was created, nine of which primarily captured aspects of the qualia of the sound environment (Level, Pace, Clarity, Complexity, Stimulation, Space, Tone, Stability, and Pattern), and eight of which captured aspects of the affective response (Connection, Stress, Familiarity, Cognitive Load, Safety, Spirit, Wellbeing, and Comfort). These items were used to describe different soundscapes, they showed good internal reliability, and the pattern of responses appeared to be valid given the sound environmental contexts (Welch et al., 2021).
In this study, we sought to explore what people who completed the SSQ thought about the questionnaire itself, how their responses reflected their experience of the soundscape, and what the influence was of completing the SSQ on their experience of psychological distance with respect to sound and hearing.
Methods
We recruited nine adults (aged 21 to 59 years) living in Auckland, New Zealand through convenience sampling using advertisements on social media. Each individual was sent a link to the SSQ, operationalised as an online questionnaire using Qualtrics. They were asked to go to any location they preferred and complete the SSQ on their mobile phones. Semi-structured interviews, based on the SSQ responses participants had made, were then conducted via online video links.
Approval to conduct the research was given by the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (Approval number 022444).
Interviews were approximately half an hour long, recorded and transcribed via Zoom. Transcriptions were edited using the intelligent verbatim approach to remove transcription errors, filler words, or broken language that detracted from the meaning of the statements. The recordings and transcripts were checked by the authors.
A general thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) was then conducted and a set of categories was established, with themes in each. Quotes were identified to support each assertion. By the nature of this type of analysis, quotes are not typically associated with individual participants, nor are counts made of the number of times themes emerge. The qualitative analysis aimed at describing themes present in the data and providing a sense of the kinds of variation that were present, without attempting to generalise the findings to a larger population. The process of theme development included familiarisation with data content and the generation of codes that described features of the data. Transcripts were then coded and the research team reviewed the codes. The research team then edited the themes and subthemes for suitability and appropriate labelling. The edited themes and codes were finally validated through consensus between the authors. NVivo software was used to assist initial coding and the labelling of themes.
Results and discussion
Themes from the interviews were categorised into three main areas. One set of themes referred to the questionnaire itself, and the extent to which it captured participants’ experiences. Within this, were sub-categories related to the qualia of the sound environments, and the affective response to them. The second area concerned the sources of the soundscape, and the insights of people into the processes that created their individual soundscapes. The third group of themes related to how the experience of thinking about the soundscape influenced participants’ awareness of sound, themselves and their hearing.
Questionnaire utility
Positive reflection
The experience of completing the questionnaire was positive and made people think: ‘It was really good. I found the questions quite interesting. Never really thought about how sound makes me feel or anything like that so yeah it was a really good experience’.
Breadth of questions
An interesting criticism of the questionnaire was that perhaps the questions were too broad and could have been associated with follow-up or probes to elicit more detail.
‘Sometimes I thought it might have been a bit too broad in the questioning. Maybe there could have been some more specific–like more detailed specific questions to follow up after some general ones’.
This suggested that participants thought deeply about the questions and implied that the SSQ was successful in promoting a reflective state of mind in which participants developed an awareness of their hearing and their internal response to the sound environment.
Comprehension
This thoughtfulness may partly have been driven by the design of the SSQ, in which the items required participants to use terms that would often not be part of their active vocabularies. We were interested to know whether this had led to confusion. Participants reported that while the questionnaire items were intelligible, some questions were seen as requiring interpretation.
‘Oh, in terms of usability, it was good. I mean some of the questions were kind of . . . you had to interpret them a certain way to answer them’. ‘I think most of the descriptors were good. I found them easy to apply unless I didn’t know what it meant, like simple sounds and complex sounds. But I could see the connection and why you would want to ask the different questions’.
The need to think about the questions implies that participants approached the questionnaire in the manner envisaged, probing their experience of the soundscape according to the prompts offered and thereby allowing insight into aspects of their experience that would not have been available if reliant only on their active vocabularies. On the other hand, the possibility of feeling confused was acknowledged, but through a process of comparison with the opposite pole of the item and reflection on the likely meaning, this was resolved.
‘I got confused with harmonious and melodious. Melodious I thought that meant something a bit more musical, and it may still, so I wasn’t too sure, but I settled on that. I sort of used that as to define something a bit softer on the ears and beautiful sounding. As opposed to harsh’. ‘Ah space okay, yeah, I think when I saw that question, when I looked at the higher end of the scale and it said claustrophobic and enclosed. And I thought that was definitely not how I feel’.
In designing the SSQ, the name of each item and the labels on the two poles were used to build a clear picture of the meaning of each item. Evidence that participants will use this information in forming their understanding before choosing to respond is encouraging. In other cases though, the apparently technical nature of some language, particularly in the items relating to qualia (e.g. ‘simple sound’ vs ‘complex sound’), could lead to a false belief that there was a ‘correct’ way to respond to an item, based on a strict definition of the terms used.
‘So, I actually did a Google search of like simple vs complex sounds. I was like I don’t know how to answer this, and so I considered the different frequencies and tones, but I’m not sure if I did it right’.
This lack of specificity in the definition of terms is a part of normal human communication, and an accepted aspect of the soundscape, since each person’s soundscape will differ for a given sound environment due to psychological differences (e.g. states, traits and memories). A respondent’s belief that there might be a correct response to an item does not impact the effectiveness of the questionnaire, but it could be beneficial to include a statement in the instructions to the effect that there are no right or wrong answers or interpretations.
Interpretation
Despite the lack of instructions to this effect, interpretation of the meaning of items could be quite idiosyncratic. Participants felt that unique situations raised different issues when appreciating and decoding the sounds.
‘To me a complex sound would be something that was higher pitch, maybe like a bird’. ‘I think, a simple sound is probably something I’m familiar with, so it’s not the unknown it’s something I hear on a regular basis, different times of the day, so that’s how I interpreted complexity’.
These comments help us understand why a given sound environment does not cause the same measured soundscape, even at the level of qualia, in different people. Participants described thought processes that did not necessarily reflect our own. For example, the use of the term ‘alienation’ in the creative writing on which the SSQ was based appeared to reflect the impact of traffic-dominated sound environments, and was what we had intended when we designed the questionnaire (Welch et al., 2021). However, the act of sitting in an environment and completing a questionnaire could also be interpreted as alienating: ‘When I was just sitting there experiencing the sound and being really focused on the sound, I wasn’t making a contribution to the sound space or the soundscape and it seemed like if I was there, I guess that’s the mentality that I had, but if I was there or not, those sounds would happen anyway . . . So that’s why I put alienating’.
It is interesting to consider whether the act of measuring the soundscape may influence a respondent’s perspective on their own position in it, and thus the soundscape itself.
Writing down or recording responses in a questionnaire is one approach to measuring the soundscape. It can be efficient and an effective way of gathering complex data from many people using a reliable instrument. However, the act can be experienced in different ways, and these experiences could influence the ratings of affective items.
‘I think it was just very hard for me to be in a relaxed or tranquil state of mind. I felt like I was doing a task’.
These interpretations of the experience of completing the questionnaire suggest that the use of a questionnaire to capture the soundscape response might introduce new, unexpected, elements to the soundscape that were not intentional in designing the questionnaire. In other words, the process of capturing the soundscape might also influence it. Despite this reaction, other responses could align with the design intent and our preconceptions.
‘I really love the beach, so when I hear waves, I get instantly relaxed’. ‘I think, like my sense of wholesomeness or my well-being, lends itself towards being in the nature. So, I kind of attribute those sounds to having a greater sense of well-being, whereas I don’t really find any great positive connotation with sounds of vehicles’.
Environmental variability
When asked to respond to a set of questions about a soundscape, variations that occur over time in most environments cannot manifest directly in the pattern of responses. A person will tend to respond to each item in the questionnaire according to either the soundscape experienced at the moment in time when they are considering that item, or to some general integration of the soundscape over time (Steffens et al., 2017).
‘I think I found the tyres–well the sounds of the cars at least–much more distinct like they felt like they were taking over the space. Whereas like the nature sounds was more constant like it was really continuous and so sometimes I just forget that it was there, and then, like when a car comes past or like a few cars come past, then that’s when like that sound takes over, and I end up concentrating on that, even if I don’t want to’.
At the same time, there may be the experience, alluded to in the quotation above, but described in more detail below, that the unchanging aspects of the sound environment can recede into the soundscape, settling into the subconscious mind and losing the details of the sound and meaning to allow a listener to relax.
‘So, I guess it all became like an ambient . . . it sounded very abstract. I’m not sure how to describe it; like white noise or something. Like the trees became this white noise and same as that the cars. That’s just how I felt listening to it, and so it was quite soothing’.
An additional challenge in responding to the affect items was the competition between sounds with different sources that triggered different affective responses.
‘I felt like I had the two opposite kinds of sounds going on. I had the beach sounds which were refreshing and rejuvenating, and then I had the cars which were distracting’.
Qualia and affect aspects of the soundscape questionnaire
The SSQ items were aimed at assessing two aspects of the soundscape: the qualia of the sound environment or the affective response (Welch et al., 2021). Preferences emerged for both aspects: ‘It [difficulty responding] was probably the last few ideas about sort of how it made you feel. You know, your feeling in your spirit and things like that, because I’m kind of one of these people that’s just a practical person. I am not too sure about how things make me feel’. ‘I think I found the easier ones more like, that “sense of belonging” and stuff you know? How I felt. Whereas maybe the ones about patterns, such as rhythmic or predictable, were harder. Because there are multiple sounds happening, I didn’t know if I should focus on like one source or the other, you know’.
In the first of the above quotes, the items in the second half of the SSQ, which related to the affective response to the soundscape, were seen as being rather fanciful in contrast to the participant’s more practical approach to life. In the second quote, the items reflecting the qualia of the sound environment were seen as more difficult to respond to due to the sense that multiple sound sources produced different qualia.
The items relating to affect appeared to be less technical than the items relating to qualia, so they were perceived as easier. However, the emotive and abstract nature of some of the terms in the items about affect brought a new challenge for respondents: that of engaging with feelings and emotions. These items described responses that many people would be unwilling or unable to describe in themselves, and drew on areas of the lexicon that may remain largely unused, especially with application to sound. One of the strengths of the SSQ is that it provokes responses from people that may be awkward to express, but which people feel.
While the preferences expressed above may be ascribed to natural human variability in approach to life, it would be interesting to explore further the sociocultural and personal factors associated with them, and how these influence the way people report on different aspects of the soundscape.
The sources of the soundscape
Aside from findings related to the questionnaire, were themes related to the perception of the soundscape.
Consideration of sound sources
We are used to thinking of sounds according to their source, rather than in terms of abstract concepts related to the sound itself. Some of the SSQ items could readily be related to the sound sources in the environment: ‘Yeah, in terms of stability, dynamic and changing, you know one second there’s birds and next there aren’t. Next there are little rustles of you know, some animal moving in the leaves on the floor’.
Furthermore, using the questionnaire made people think and re-evaluate their approach to sound; to realise that the meaningfulness in the sounds depends a lot on attitudes held towards the source of each sound.
‘When I was taking it, this questionnaire, I think the realisation that I did have was about why I feel how I feel about these sounds. It was more like that connection I make with the people from where the sound is coming from’.
Role of non-auditory perception
The interplay between the auditory and other sensory systems is acknowledged in the perception of the soundscape (Li and Lau, 2020). The external stimulus that creates the soundscape does not come only from sounds, and people may be aware of this: ‘But it’s kind of like taste and smell you know? You can’t have one of those without the other. Not to the full extent. I think sound is a bit like that too, with the other senses’.
State of mind
The idea that psychological differences also contribute to the soundscape is also accepted in research in the field. The possibility that a person’s pre-existing state of mind may have an influence on the soundscape was explicitly acknowledged by participants.
‘So, I think that’s why I put dynamic and changing because I knew that the environment around me was busy. And maybe even though I was physically tired, I was still active and alert and aware’. ‘It was just kind of a relaxing part of the day, just before dinner, so that answer probably had more to do with my general feeling of sitting there’. ‘I knew I only had a half-hour break, so I thought I need to eat, where do I go to get something to eat, then do this questionnaire. So, you know it was a little mentally overloaded yeah’.
Other associations
The interaction between environmental influences and participants’ state of mind may benefit from future research. In a similar vein, awareness of other aspects of the environment in the form of memories and associations was acknowledged: ‘Then, if I was listening to the nature sounds, I kind of connect that to me out in nature as well and enjoying that. It’s kind of like a memory kind of thing. So, I think memories are really connected to what I was hearing and how I was experiencing it’. ‘I think sound doesn’t really bother me too much. So, I think, even if I’m in an unfamiliar environment, I don’t think it would be the sound that puts me off. It might be the people or maybe the reason why I’m there. But not really the sound’.
In the second of the quotes above, it was suggested that sound might not even play a role in some types of response. However, despite soundscape being influenced by factors other than sound, people can and do promote the auditory aspect over other aspects of an environment.
‘I put that I felt congested, claustrophobic, and I’m not entirely sure why I felt that at the time. Just because there were so many noises and that made me feel like there was a lot of stuff going on, because I was sitting outside. It’s quite an open space so. I’m just wondering if it was the fact that there were so many sounds and I was trying to focus on everything that was going on around me’.
In the above example, the sound produced an impression that conflicted with the knowledge of being in an open space, but the response reflected the influence of the sounds above other sensory inputs. Quotes like these demonstrate that the response to a soundscape item is transparent to a respondent, but that it involves the weighing of different aspects of the percept. Given similar external environments and thought processes, two different respondents may give contrasting responses.
A new awareness
New attitude to sound
Part of our thinking in beginning our work on the SSQ was to develop an instrument that might provoke respondents to think about sound and their hearing more than usual. A set of themes was developed from the interviews that captured the responses to this process.
‘It was quite a new experience for me. Making that connection between your own feelings and realising how many sounds we hear but also don’t hear, or ignore, you know?’ ‘Prior to just sitting down and listening, I wasn’t really that aware that, like how much on the sound really influenced my own experience’. ‘I was really attentive to what was happening around me. I wanted it to be natural, but I also realised that I wouldn’t even think about the sound environment like this normally’.
This new experience of thinking about sound and hearing likely reflects a new awareness of their everyday experience as they move through different sound environments. Completing the SSQ made participants listen.
‘Normally I would sit there and not even think about the sounds, probably looking at stuff on my phone or whatever. But when you actually sit there and listen, you do realise how many sounds are around you’. ‘I thought, ‘Oh, let’s see what this place brings about’, but I was kind of surprised about how many sounds there were around me’.
New behaviour
The new experience of listening led to participants reporting changes in their behaviour during the few days between completing the SSQ and conducting the interview.
‘But when I sat down and actually focused on it, there was a lot of stuff going on around me that I was just not focused on. Now I walk the dog without my earphones, and I listen to nature and the roads and everything’.
New state of mind
Despite these changes, participants could be distracted from their focus on sounds and completing the questionnaire.
‘Interesting I think would be the best way to describe . . . But I do enjoy doing different things and understanding my own reactions to doing something different. I did find it hard to focus on the sounds for the five minutes or whatever it took to do the survey. My mind drifted off into thinking about other things’.
Was this loss of focus really distraction, or did the unusual experience of listening to the world lead participants to a different state of mind? ‘Then also it was quite introspective because answering the questionnaire, of course it makes you look, in a little bit more and be a bit more aware, which I quite like. It put me in a pretty meditative state, because you’re really following the sounds rather than just taking them for granted. And I actually funnily enough try to do that, in general, one of my easiest ways to go into a meditative state is to focus on sound .’.. ‘I kind of liked it at first, because just that stopping and kind of that, mindfulness stuff, where you just really focus on what’s going on around you. I think that can be quite calming’. ‘It wasn’t like listening to a meditation, but it was kind of on that scale, maybe somewhere in between. Because I was in nature sounds, I felt sort of like I am connecting with the world around me, which can be quite grounding and calming’.
These quotes on mindfulness and meditation suggest that the process of forming an awareness of the soundscape is akin to the awareness of life that is characteristic of mindfulness, and may also be seen as a route towards a meditative state.
New consideration of hearing
Awareness of sound also led people to think more about their hearing. People rarely think about their hearing. We know that we are aware of sounds, and that the auditory system must be involved, but hearing itself occurs subconsciously and while we can deliberately listen for something, more often our auditory system acts in a receptive manner and people do not think about it.
‘If it’s sort of in the background and you’re not thinking of it, it’s just white noise, for lack of better term. And so, when you actually like listen, it’s almost like you’re focusing your eyes. It’s the same thing. You’re focusing your ears to any certain thing’.
The comparison with vision made here is an interesting one: our eyesight is usually consciously directed at a target, and a target can be removed from our vision if we close or avert our eyes. On the contrary, our hearing is always there, and while we can certainly direct our auditory attention, there is also an ongoing auditory awareness without conscious direction, and whether we are awake or asleep. Awareness of an association between listening to a sound and the physical process of hearing was also new: ‘I haven’t ever linked my listening to my physical hearing ability, if that makes sense. I think of this listening as an experience, but then it doesn’t make me think too much about the actual hearing itself’.
And in this context, an awareness of the value of hearing may emerge.
‘Yeah, there were definitely moments . . . of appreciation that I can hear. Maybe not so explicitly but more just like ‘wow, it’s a good thing I’m not deaf’ essentially’.
Overall, the SSQ was reported as being enjoyable to complete and the items appeared to encourage respondents to think in more depth about the soundscape. This led to a greater awareness of sound and hearing.
Discussion
Participants found completing the SSQ a novel and interesting experience. The questionnaire allowed participants to describe their experiences, although sometimes the basis for responses was idiosyncratic. Participants gained insight into the soundscape and recognised that it was influenced not only by the sound environment but also the visual, as well as internal psychological processes like memory and attitudes. The experience of thinking about the soundscape was seen as new and made respondents think about themselves and their attitude to sound and hearing, potentially reducing the psychological distance from sound and hearing for participants.
The questionnaire itself was considered well designed and thought provoking. Nonetheless, it did pose challenges for participants. The vocabulary caused participants to think hard about the meaning of items before selecting an answer. Most sound environments are changeable, and those changes cannot easily be registered in responses to a single questionnaire. Furthermore, the relative contributions of different elements in the sound environment may also change over time, and these changes might be external (e.g. a car arriving) or internal to the participant (e.g. elements of the environment being treated as background after listening for some time). This potential for sound environments to alter is a challenge for the collection of accurate soundscape data via questionnaires. The items relating to qualia were sometimes perceived as rather ‘technical’ in nature, while those related to affect were sometimes seen as ‘impractical’.
Participants showed sophisticated views about the sources of the soundscape, acknowledging the roles of the other senses, memory and other aspects of their pre-existing psychological state in their perception of the soundscape. Presumably a person’s state will influence the soundscape ‘from within’ alongside environmental influences ‘from without’; however psychological state may well interact with the environmental input so that an environment that would lead to a person experiencing a soundscape as being interesting and stimulating, when in one frame of mind, but as terrifying or threatening when in a different frame of mind.
A strength of the SSQ is that it contains items related to qualia of the sound environment as well as the affective response to the soundscape. Our thematic analysis revealed that participants found the consideration of the qualia of the sound both challenging and interesting. It is unusual for us to think about sounds themselves, but participants were able to do so and this led them to reconsider their attitudes towards sound and hearing, suggesting that psychological distance may have reduced. Furthermore, the newness of the experience of thinking about the soundscape was a strong theme in the data. This new experience gave rise to new behaviours, promoted a more meditative or mindful state, and gave participants a heightened appreciation of hearing. This new awareness also appears to reflect a reduction in the psychological distance of hearing and sound for the participants.
Conceptually, for many people in societies that are removed from sound as an immediate cue for survival, sound per se is psychologically very distant; we are aware of sound in music or speech, but the sound is tangential to the semantic aspects of the information conveyed to us through those systems (Reybrouck, 2013; Truax, 2022), which is what people are often listening to. We rarely consider the sound itself. By completing an exercise of listening to the environment for a few minutes and giving feedback on the soundscape generated, a new awareness of sound, and their own hearing, was created for participants.
Strengths and limitations
The data analysed in this study were qualitative, allowing an in-depth understanding of participants’ views and experiences. Having designed the SSQ from a start-point of the qualitative analysis of creative writing about the soundscape, then using quantitative approaches to assess the reliability and validity of the questionnaire in large numbers of participants (Welch et al., 2019b), it was valuable to close the circle by returning to a qualitative approach to explore the thinking underlying the responses, and to consider how completing the SSQ might influence respondents.
Doing so revealed that the questionnaire was limited by participant interpretations of the items, and by changes in the sound environment, which it cannot necessarily capture. Furthermore, the state of mind of the respondent, prior to entering a sound environment likely interacts with that environment in complex ways, so a soundscape will not reliably be associated with a given sound environment. Nonetheless, these restrictions do not suggest the questionnaire data are invalid; they are intrinsic to the nature of questionnaires. The greater flexibility and efficiency, and the readily quantifiable nature of questionnaire data are arguments in favour of retaining them alongside other measures, such as soundwalks, for the assessment of soundscapes.
On the other hand, the findings suggested that the psychological distance of sound and hearing could be reduced in people who complete the SSQ. In hearing-health education, especially in the prevention of noise-induced hearing loss, there is a need for this because, in general, the psychological distance of sound and hearing is great, so educational messages may have little impact. The SSQ is quick to complete, is thought-provoking for respondents and may reduce the psychological distance of sound and hearing for them. Future research may establish whether the SSQ is beneficial as a preparatory component to hearing-health education interventions.
The limitation of thematic qualitative research is that themes identified may not necessarily translate to meaningful changes that would be demonstrable in quantitative research, or indeed generalise to the population at large. Nonetheless, the findings reported here encourage future research to test for positive measurable outcomes in terms of hearing health behaviour. Another possible limitation is that only one soundscape questionnaire was used, although several exist. Given that all are designed on a similar principle of asking people to comment on their own perceptual experiences from a sound environment, other questionnaires would likely also suffer from the same limitations and provide the same benefits in terms of psychological distance.
Conclusion
While the questionnaire had some limitations in capturing the soundscape, these were understandable and acceptable. The finding that completing it may reduce the psychological distance of sound and hearing suggests a potential role for it in ‘pre-conditioning’ people before delivering hearing-health education (e.g. about prevention of noise-induced hearing loss). Future research may usefully investigate this in a hearing-health education context.
