An examination of factors affecting healthy building: An empirical study in east China
Introduction
With the fast urbanization process in China, there is an increasing demand for buildings in cities. The health of buildings is also considered to be critical because it has a close relationship with people (Abdou, 1997). Nowadays, people spend up to 80% of their time in buildings (Sessa et al., 2002). The health of the buildings has become one of their major concerns (Marmot et al., 2006). For example, unhealthy interior decoration materials may cause headaches, nausea, nightmares, feeling of collapse and nasal irritation (Jaakkola et al., 2006). With the development of science and medical technology, people have a higher demand on healthy working and living environment than ever before (Davies, 2009). A healthy building environment provides good indoor air quality, adequate lighting, and comfortable temperature and humidity (Sessa et al., 2002).
However, it is undeniable that there are many health issues during building’s life cycle. For example, construction dust contributes to air pollution, which causes various environmental and health problems (Tokmechi, 2011). Construction workers suffer from enormous stress on building sites due to various health and safety problems, such as noise, dust and falling from high structures or scaffolding (Gomes et al., 2002, Chen et al., 2012). Furthermore, some buildings may have hidden defects which threaten people’s and buildings’ health, such as fire hazard, deterioration of materials and poor maintenance (Dong, 2014). Some materials may produce odors that can cause health problems, such as headaches, nausea, nightmares, nasal irritation, sneezing and coughing, and the problems worsen if there is no adequate ventilation (Jaakkola et al., 2006, Fang et al., 2004). Sick building syndrome (SBS), like sleepiness, dizziness and chest congestion, did afflict nearly 25 million people in around 10 million American buildings (Murphy, 2006), and there are also many complaints about indoor air quality from occupants (Walsh et al., 2014). Therefore, the health of building is important for the safety and health of people, both physically and psychologically.
However, little research effort has been made to examine the impact factors of healthy buildings during their life cycle. Most existing studies focus on a single stage of building’s life cycle and ignore the changes of building health in different stages. Some scholars study the indoor health of occupants, without considering construction workers, maintenance workers, building operation staff. In the existing studies, the concepts of green building, eco-building, and low-carbon building are widely used. Therefore, there is a need to conduct a comprehensive review of healthy buildings and appropriately define the term healthy building. The paper aims to identify the key impact factors (KIFs) of a healthy building during its life cycle, develop a systematic framework that incorporates all these impact factors, and give a comprehensive connotation of healthy building. The findings provide useful theoretical support and practical guidance, with which to improve the health status of buildings and enrich the healthy building theories, as well as promote the healthy building concept in construction industry.
Section snippets
Connotation and development of healthy buildings
Under the background from “Healthy City” (on 1984 Toronto International Congress) to “Healthy China” (in 13th Five-Year Plan beginning in 2016 in China), healthy building, initially regarded as a designing primer for a living environment, has been a gradual focus of research interest (Holdsworth, 1992). A model is provided for examining harmful indoor elements (Wyon, 1993). It is confirmed that interior environmental quality is positively correlated with people’s health (Fisk et al., 1993).
Identification of factors affecting healthy building
Gordon introduced life cycle cost management theory in 1964. After that, life cycle management has been applied in various industries. Life cycle management for buildings can be divided into five stages: planning, design, construction, operation, and demolition (Grussing, 2014). The formation of a building entity actually begins during the design stage in that there is a focus on preparatory work in the planning stage (Clark, 2009). Therefore, the four stages including design, construction,
Questionnaire development
Questionnaire investigation was adopted to analyze these identified impact factors further. The purpose of the questionnaire is to investigate different perceptions on the importance of factors above and determine the importance index of them, based on which, KIFs will finally be identified.
There are three main sections in the questionnaire. Section 1 is about the background of respondents. Four questions (Q1-Q4) were designed regarding the highly-specialized profession of this research to
Reliability analysis
Cronbach’s alpha is often used to test the internal consistency of collected data. Cronbach’s alpha measures internal consistency (reliability) on a scale between 0 and 1 based on the average inter-item correlation. The reliability is acceptable if the Cronbach’s alpha value is more than 0.7 (Aigbavboa and Thwala, 2013). Cronbach’s alpha was used in this study to test the internal consistency among the impact factors. All Cronbach’s coefficients are more than 0.7, as shown in Table 2.
Ranking of factors
The
Conclusions
Buildings play major roles in economic, social, and environmental activities in the development of construction industry. Their health status should be properly examined when considering implementation. In fact, the health of building involves many complicated impact factors during its life cycle, and on the contrary, relevant comprehensive research studies are still unavailable, which leads to an ambiguous connotation of healthy building in these days. It is of great significance to make an
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