Measuring Discomfort from Glare: Recommendations for Good Practice

ABSTRACT

This article presents a review of the methods used for subjective evaluation of discomfort from glare, focusing on the two procedures most frequently used in past research – adjustment and category rating. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that some aspects of these procedures influence the evaluation, such as the range of glare source luminances available in an adjustment procedure, leading to biased evaluations and which hence reduce the reliability and validity of the data. The article offers recommendations for good practice when using these procedures and also suggests alternative methods that might be explored in further work.

KEYWORDS:

• Discomfort glare
• lighting
• experimental methods

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lighting R&D Program, part of the Building Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) and the Republic of Singapore’s National Research Foundation through a grant to the Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore (BEARS) for the Singapore-Berkeley Building Efficiency and Sustainability in the Tropics (SinBerBEST) Program. BEARS has been established by the University of California, Berkeley as a center for intellectual excellence in research and education in Singapore.