Postoccupancy Evaluation

The measurement of housing occupants’ behavioral reactions to their social and physical surroundings is the primary purpose of postoccupancy evaluations (POE). Since the early 1960s, systematic building evaluations have been conducted to determine the ways in which program and design objectives have been realized in residential settings. POEs are distinct from less formal methods of building and site assessments in that the evaluator seeks to place the occupied housing environment in the context of well-defined building owner, occupant, and designer goals and to measure the degree to which these goals are enhanced or retarded by the physical setting. Behavioral measures collected in these evaluations are concerned with privacy, security, use of internal and external space, building image, resident satisfaction, and personalization of space. The ultimate goal of accumulating information from POEs is the creation of design guidelines that will assist housing authorities, developers, and designers to plan effectively for the needs of the occupants.

A number of governmental housing agencies, private developers, and building designers now use data collected from POEs to guide their decisions in the creation of housing environments for residents of a range of housing types. Since the 1990s, the methods and outcome measures of POEs have been expanded to assess the environmental and sustainability consequences of housing designs. The most recent use of POE information has been in the development of housing guidelines for special populations, especially the elderly, those requiring specific physical settings to compensate for disabilities, and populations that live in unique social arrangements.

The term postoccupancy evaluation has been formalized within the design and behavioral science professions to define systematic assessments of physical environments and the effects these environments have on the people who inhabit and use them. In this respect, POEs often are collaborative research efforts that draw on the theories and methods of sociology, anthropology, psychology, interior design, architecture, landscape architecture, and human-factors design. A useful compendium of POE methods and applications, compiled by Preiser, places POEs in the larger context of building diagnostics. This latter form of environmental analysis encompasses a wide range of environmental assessments, which, in addition to behavioral measurements, includes building component performance and economic analyses. The essential elements of a POE are (a) clearly defined client and occupant goals that are used to inform the design process, (b) standardized instruments (questionnaires, interviews, observation techniques) that record and measure behavioral and attitudinal responses to the occupied environment, (c) theoretical models that show how those responses are linked to the client and occupant goals and physical conditions, and (d) standards of comparison that place data from a specific POE in the [Page 548]context of similar occupant groups and physical settings. Advances in POE theory and applications have tended to be focused in work and health care environments, primarily because client groups that own and manage these facilities have vested interests to ensure high levels of human responsiveness in process-oriented behavioral settings. Wolfgang Preiser and Jacqueline Vischer use the term building performance evaluations (BPE) in an attempt to integrate the behavioral techniques and theories of POEs with the associated environmental factors of life safety, building economics, and environmental quality.

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