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2010
Conference Paper
Titel
Modeling of environmental comfort using structural equation models - discussion of target variables
Abstract
Considering the nature of the phenomenon comfort as a construct the approach of structural equation modeling is used for analysis of the assessment of an indoor environment. Three aspects of environmental comfort have been considered: thermal comfort, air quality and aural comfort. Comfort models have been developed based on data from simulated flights in the Fraunhofer Flight Test Facility. Two models are compared: one with the intervening variables of environmental sensation as target variables, one without them mapping environmental indices directly to comfort assessments. The latter model is better evaluated since the intervening sensational variables are increasing the complexity of the model. This yields to worse fit-indices and a need for very large samples. Thus it is proposed to use items directly related to a persons' perception of comfort when developing environmental comfort models.