## 2 Methods
### The Questionnaire  
To evaluate the subjective effect of L\({}_{\text{Aeq}}\) in the mall on the staff working at the different facilities, a survey was conducted using a simple questionnaire consisting of two sets of questions. The first is general demographic questions about the age, gender, educational level, income level, occupation, and working time. The second group of questions is related to hearing problems, as well as the acoustical comfort ratings in the workplace and the included six questions. The questions were structured with a Likert scale (a 5-point scale) in questions 2-4, related to the subjective loudness (very quiet, quiet, fair, noisy, or very noisy), acoustic comfort (ranging from very comfortable to very uncomfortable), and preferences for working in noisy environments (ranging from very good to very bad). Questions 5 and 6 asked about the main source of noise and the main problems and health effects on the employees. The questions used in this study were adopted from different studies investigating the acoustic comfort of people in non-performance spaces [10; 11; 12; 13]. Open-ended questions were avoided. A pilot study was  
Figure 3: A sample measurement of 60 s from the food court at the three different locations measured on Friday afternoon.  
done on five subjects prior to data collection to insure face validity and clarity of the questions. Based on that pilot, the questions were reviewed and formatted. The questionnaire started with a paragraph informing the user of its purpose and taking his/her approval to participate. The questionnaire and the informed consent forms were written in the Arabic language to ensure clarity for the small employees. The English versions of the questions are shown in Table 1.  
The survey was filled electronically, using Google Forms. The survey was conducted in October 2019, over one week. In the selection of the study week, the authors tried to avoid national and religious holidays, to ensure the results represented typical conditions. Participants were fully informed about the study, either by reading the first introductory paragraph and approving it electronically or by one of the researchers verbally for illiterate participants. A non-probability convenience sampling strategy was used, where everyone in each of the four locations was selected to participate, up to a minimum number of filled questionnaires. In total, 110 people were asked to fill out the questionnaire, and out of them, 104 people (94.5%) accepted and completely filled out the questionnaire. Two questionnaires (2%) were discarded because their participants already had permanent hearing problems. The questionnaire was self-administrated while one of the researchers was present during the administration for help. During the data cleaning, all incomplete questionnaires were discarded.  
Data were stored in an Excel spreadsheet and then transferred to the commercial MATLAB Program for statistical analysis. Categorical questions were evaluated by the percentage of frequency of occurrence, and the mean values are given for continuous measures. Statistical comparisons between values are provided, where applicable, using a two-tailed N-1 Chi-Square test for different groups and a one-dimensional ANOVA for comparisons between more than two groups. A \(p<0.05\) was used to indicate a statistically significant difference.