Published papers

Creating healthy and comfortable indoor environments requires not only controlling physical conditions but also accurately capturing how occupants experience them. POE is a practical approach for providing building owners, operators, and design teams with actionable knowledge derived from occupants’ evaluations, yet substantial individual variability persists. One under-explored source of this variability is whether stable personality traits systematically influence the reporting of IEQ-related experiences in POE. A survey of the office environment was conducted with 1537 white-collar workers from 62 offices (tenant companies) across 29 buildings. Personality was measured using the Big Five personality traits framework comprising extraversion (sociability), agreeableness (cooperativeness), conscientiousness (self-discipline; preference for structure), neuroticism (emotional sensitivity), and openness to experience (curiosity). Item-wise ordinal logistic regressions, controlling for gender, age, and occupation, revealed widespread trait associations. Agreeableness was associated with 39 of the 51 items and was linked primarily to lower favorable evaluations. Extraversion was positively related to spaces that support social interaction and communication. Neuroticism was negatively related to items capturing negative conditions such as internal noise and thermal discomfort. Conscientiousness showed a minimal association. Although the results are subject to cultural and regional constraints and potential measurement tool-related limitations, the findings suggest that personality traits are a meaningful individual-level factor underlying the heterogeneity of POE responses and may inform trait-aware interpretation of occupant surveys.

As tourism governance and practice evolve, destinations are increasingly striving to improve sustainability and the holistic well-being of communities. Therefore, sustainable tourism indicators offer a practical first step for sustainability transformation by translating broad goals into measurable implementation pathways. However, evidence remains dominated by case studies, limiting cross-destination benchmarking. This study benchmarked sustainable tourism implementation maturity in Japan using the Japan Sustainable Tourism Standard for Destinations, a localized framework aligned with the four Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria for Destinations domains. Self-assessments from destination governance organizations in 47 destination units across 27 prefectures were rated on a six-level maturity scale and converted to scores of 0–100 for domain- and item-level comparison. The mean total score was 51.7 (standard deviation 19.3), indicating intermediate maturity with substantial variation. Governance scored highest (55.7) and environmental sustainability lowest (47.1); differences among the higher-scoring domains were small, whereas environmental sustainability was consistently the lowest. Bottlenecks were concentrated in criteria less readily embedded in routine tourism administration, whereas criteria based in administration showed higher maturity. Cluster analysis identified co-implemented practice bundles and stand-alone criteria, offering insights for staged and targeted support strategies. These findings should be interpreted as a benchmark for participating destinations and not as a population-representative estimate for all destinations in Japan.