The study of effect of educational intervention on noise annoyance among workers in a textile industry

Abstract Noise is one the most common health hazards in the workplace. Noise-induced annoyance, as a measurable mental response, is one of the most significant adverse effects of noise. The level of annoyance from environmental noise is affected by several non-acoustic factors such as personality traits, hearing sensitivity, or attitude. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of hearing conservation education program on noise annoyance among workers of the textile industry. This is a pretest–posttest quasi-experimental study conducted upon the case group and the control group. 162 textile-industry workers exposed to excessive noise (77 individuals in the case group and 85 in the control group) were randomly selected and studied. The sound pressure level was first measured in the above-mentioned industry. Then, the degree of individual's noise annoyance was assessed using the ISO 15666 questionnaire and their knowledge, attitude, and practice using the KAP questionnaire 1 . The educational package was developed based on expert opinion and the initial assessment, and the questionnaires were completed after the educational intervention. The results revealed that an educational intervention would increase noise annoyance among the workers in the case group. It also affects the knowledge, attitude, and practice scores and improves them. Based on the results, older individuals experienced more noise annoyance, and practice improved with individual's age. The results of the study suggested that an educational intervention would lead to an increase in noise annoyance among workers by affecting their attitudes. It also improves knowledge, attitude, and practice scores. This survey is one of the few studies that focused exclusively on the impact of an educational intervention on noise annoyance. Therefore, the relationship between education and noise-induced annoyance in this article needs to be validated for other industrial settings with excessive noise, especially other textile factories.