Air Quality Matters

This week, we dive into a question that goes beyond sensors and science: What actually motivates people to invest in clean air for their homes—and does culture change everything?

The paper is titled Indoor Air Quality: Predicting and Comparing Protective Behaviours in Germany and Portugal, published in Indoor Air, and it's based on survey data from 800 participants split evenly between the two nations. This research uses Protection Motivation Theory to unpack the psychological and cultural drivers behind adopting indoor air quality technologies—things like sensors, air purifiers, and ventilation systems.

Key Insights:

Germany: Autonomy and Family Duty: For German participants, the biggest driver was self-efficacy—the feeling of "I can do this." They need to feel capable, empowered, and in control. There's also a strong link to benevolence caring—particularly protecting close family, especially children. In Germany, you're not buying an air purifier for yourself. You're buying it because you feel a personal responsibility to safeguard your immediate circle.

Portugal: Prove It Works: For Portuguese participants, self-efficacy didn't move the needle. Instead, it was all about response efficacy—does this thing actually work? They're pragmatic consumers. If you tell them it works, you better be able to prove it. Also, people who already had respiratory conditions were much more likely to adopt the tech—health status mattered in Portugal, but not in Germany.

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: You can't use the same messaging in Berlin as you do in Lisbon. In Berlin, you say: "Take control of your home and protect your children." In Lisbon, you say: "This device is proven to reduce particulate matter by 99%."

Fear Doesn't Work: Perceived vulnerability—the feeling that "I am personally at risk of getting sick"—had almost no impact on whether people adopted the technology. None. But perceived severity did. People are motivated when they acknowledge that poor air quality is a serious global or environmental problem—but they aren't motivated by feeling personally weak or susceptible.

The COVID Hangover: The authors suggest this might be a legacy of the pandemic. We became accustomed to taking protective measures—masks, sanitisers, ventilation—not because we were terrified for our own safety every day, but because we recognised the severity of the threat in a broader, almost civic sense.

This is Part Five of a five-part series exploring the psychology and perception of risk around air quality and ventilation.

Indoor Air Quality: Predicting and Comparing Protective Behaviours in Germany and Portugal

https://doi.org/10.1155/2024/3006342

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Psychology of Air Quality Behavior
00:00:55 The Missing Episode: Germany and Portugal Study Context
00:02:12 The Research Framework: Protection Motivation Theory
00:03:07 Threat and Coping: The Two Mental Processes
00:03:59 The German Mindset: Self-Efficacy and Family Protection
00:04:59 The Portuguese Perspective: Prove It Works
00:06:10 One Size Doesn't Fit All: Cultural Messaging Matters
00:06:31 The Vulnerability Paradox: Fear Doesn't Drive Action
00:07:29 The COVID Legacy: Civic Responsibility Over Personal Fear
00:08:15 The Performance Gap Problem: Why Efficacy Matters
00:08:53 Demographics and Early Adopters: The Youth Factor
00:09:26 Study Limitations and Economic Context
00:09:52 The Key Takeaway: From Education to Empowerment
00:10:46 The Path Forward: Respect, Severity, and Solutions
00:11:17 Closing Thoughts: Understanding the Human Element

This week, we step into one of the most overlooked yet critical areas of air quality and health: the construction site. While we spend so much time talking about indoor air quality during the operational phase of buildings, there's an entire workforce—construction and demolition workers—who spend their careers in environments that are anything but operational. And the risks they face are profound.

We sit down with Angie Brooker, Occupational Health Manager at Multiplex, to explore the layered, dynamic, and often invisible hazards of dust exposure in construction—and what one of the UK's most forward-thinking organisations is doing about it.

Key Topics Discussed:

The Three Categories of Dust: Wood dust, general construction dust, and silica dust—each with different risks, different sources, and different control measures. Why silica, particularly from artificial stone, has become a focal point of concern.

The Complexity of Construction Environments: Why construction sites are uniquely challenging—dynamic spaces, changing materials, multiple trades working on top of each other, high turnover, and the constant tension between program deadlines and health protection.

The Artificial Stone Crisis: How engineered stone (containing up to 90% silica) has caused an epidemic of accelerated silicosis globally—and why Multiplex has banned it on all upcoming projects. The Australia case study, the thousand cases identified, and the proactive public health response.

Hierarchy of Controls in Practice: From elimination and substitution (banning artificial stone) to engineering controls (on-tool extraction, ventilation) to administrative controls (training, awareness, health intervention tours) to PPE (the right mask, worn correctly, every time).

The RPE Challenge: Why respiratory protective equipment is the frontline defence—but also why it's so hard to get right. Facial hair, improper fit, leaving masks hanging like "Christmas decorations," the heat and discomfort, and the cultural resistance to wearing them.

Health Intervention Tours (HITs): How Multiplex walks sites monthly, focusing purely on health hazards, giving positive feedback and room-for-improvement interventions, and using personal dust monitors to make the invisible visible.

The Silica 25 Programme: Three pillars—prevention (banning artificial stone), protection (appropriate RPE, education, awareness), and detection (health surveillance, lung function testing, baseline chest X-rays).

This is a conversation about risk, responsibility, and the long game. It's about recognising that construction workers deserve to retire healthy—and that every day we delay action, we're storing up a public health crisis for the future.

GUEST:

Angie Brooker - Occupational Health Manager, Multiplex

https://www.linkedin.com/in/angie-brooker-abba85123/

https://www.multiplex.global/

https://www.lungsatwork.org.uk/

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Ultra Protect (https://www.ultra-protect.co.uk/air-quality-matters)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: Construction Workers and Air Quality Risk
00:01:38 Meet Angela Brooker: Occupational Health in Construction
00:03:59 The Dust Challenge: Categories and Construction Hazards
00:05:44 The Dynamic Construction Environment: A Complex Risk Landscape
00:14:46 The Latent Disease Problem: Why Long-Term Risks Get Ignored
00:20:23 The Liability Gap: Accountability for Chronic Occupational Disease
00:24:50 The Cultural Challenge: From Bravado to Protection
00:36:06 Artificial Stone and Silicosis: The Accelerated Epidemic
00:34:42 The Silica 25 Program: Prevention, Protection, and Detection
00:09:08 Housekeeping and Hidden Exposures: The Resuspension Risk
01:07:57 Respiratory Protection: The Mask Problem
00:31:48 Health Intervention Tours: Making Health Visible on Site
01:19:47 Monitoring and Measurement: Dust Tracking Technology
01:35:14 Health Surveillance: Early Detection and the Medical System
01:31:58 The Smoking Factor: Compounding the Risk
01:27:12 From Nurse to Construction: Angela's Journey
01:39:19 The Path Forward: Getting the Basics Right
01:42:12 Closing: Resources and Support for Construction Workers

This week, we dive into a powerful piece of research that moves beyond surveys and snapshots to ask: What actually motivates people in deprived urban communities to change their indoor air quality behaviours—and how long does it take?

The paper is titled Psychological and Contextual Drivers of Indoor Air Quality Behaviours in a Deprived Urban Community: Evidence from Participatory Research, published in Building and Environment, and it's based on the Well Home Project—an 18-month longitudinal study tracking 110 households in West London.

The Central Question

Unlike most studies that rely on a quick one-off survey, this was participatory research. They didn't just treat residents as test subjects—they worked with them, engaged them, installed sensors in their homes, and followed them over time across four waves of surveys. This is crucial because we know that air pollution disproportionately affects deprived communities—people living in substandard housing, closer to busy roads, with higher rates of pre-existing health conditions. So understanding what drives them to act is absolutely vital if we want to address health inequalities.

But here's the fascinating part: self-efficacy grew over time. At the start of the project, confidence didn't make a huge difference. But as the months went on, people with high self-efficacy became increasingly likely to act. Building that muscle of confidence—that feeling of "I can handle this"—is a process, not a switch.

Key Insights:

The Mold Effect—Visibility is Key: The strongest predictor of behaviour change in the entire study was the presence of visible mold and damp. If people saw mold, they acted. But mold is a late-stage indicator—by the time you see black spots on your wall, you've probably been breathing in damp air for months. We need to make other pollutants visible before the damage is done.

Engagement is a Marathon, Not a Sprint: The longer people were involved in the Well Home Project, the more likely they were to change their behaviour. Sustained engagement is essential—not just a one-off flyer.

What Actually Changed: Residents were most likely to report changes in window opening, cooking, and cleaning. But the only behaviours that showed a statistically significant increase over time were cooking and heating. Why? These might require more knowledge or confidence to adopt—things people learned through participation in the project.

What Didn't Change: Smoking behaviour showed the lowest likelihood of change. Smoking is an addiction—a deeply habitual chemical dependency. Simply telling someone it's bad for indoor air is unlikely to break a nicotine addiction. Some issues require much more specific, targeted health interventions.

The Education Paradox: Individuals with higher levels of education were actually less likely to adopt behavioural changes. The authors speculate this might be a ceiling effect—people with higher education might already be doing some of the right things before the study even started, so they had less room to improve.

Participatory Research Works: By working with communities, the researchers didn't just gather data—they helped catalyze change. The residents who stuck with the project became more and more empowered to control their own environment.

This is Part Four of a five-part series exploring the psychology and perception of risk around air quality and ventilation.

Psychological and Contextual Drivers of Indoor Air Quality Behaviours in a Deprived Urban Community: Evidence from Participatory Research

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.114089

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Psychology of Indoor Air Quality in West London
00:01:16 The Well Home Project: Participatory Research in Action
00:02:14 The Health Belief Model: Understanding What Drives Action
00:03:36 The Key Findings: Severity and Self-Efficacy Win
00:04:41 The Mold Effect: When Visibility Drives Action
00:05:32 Time and Confidence: The Longitudinal Effect
00:06:23 What Changed and What Didn't: Behavior Breakdown
00:07:49 The Education Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions
00:08:39 The So What: From Scare Tactics to Empowerment
00:10:07 Closing Thoughts: Residents as Active Agents

Welcome back to a solo episode—it's just me this week, fresh off a plane from Las Vegas and the AHR Expo, and honestly, in a bit of a reflective mood. When you spend a week inside the ultimate sealed box that is Vegas—losing track of time, weather, and what the air is actually doing—it puts things in perspective. It's comfort manufactured at massive scale, designed to keep you sedated, happy, and spending money. And stepping back into the real world, looking at the sheer volume of noise landing on my desk—commissions, pledges, papers, announcements—I had to pause.

The Central Question

On one hand, we've never had more attention. We have the Global Commission on Healthy Indoor Air launching at the UN. We have the Global Pledge. We have Ashrae's new Indoor Environmental Quality Centre of Excellence. It feels like the ground is moving. But on the other hand, I look at who's in the room. I look at the jostling for position. And I have to ask: Is this a genuine revolution, or is it a narrative grab? Are we drawing a line in the sand for public health—or building a new VIP section for the haves, while the have-nots are left outside in the smog?

Key Topics Discussed:

The Narrative Grab: What happens when a grassroots movement gains enough momentum to become valuable—and the big institutions, legacy corporations, and governing bodies realize they need to own a piece of that story. Is the commission a natural reaction of a sector trying to organize itself? Absolutely. But is it also a narrative grab? Potentially, yes.

Who's in the Room—and Who Isn't: When I scroll through the lists of participants and commissioners, I see a lot of familiar names. Big HVAC. Controls. Sensors. Certification bodies. Real estate. Western academics. But where is the social science? Where are the voices from the Global South—not satellite offices, but grassroots? Where are the housing activists fighting damp and mold in public housing? It feels heavy on corporate real estate, heavy on Western technocracy.

The Risk of Premium Air: When you turn health into a premium product, you create a two-tier system: platinum-class air for Google headquarters, and the rest of us—schools with windows painted shut, social housing with fans that haven't worked since 2015, industrial units thick with process dust. If the narrative becomes owned by commercial real estate, does clean air become a luxury good you buy, rather than a fundamental human right that is owed?

The Mandate Debate: A fascinating clash playing out in the academic literature right now. On one side, a paper in Science led by Lidia Morawska and others: Mandating Indoor Air Quality for Public Buildings. Bold, noble, seductive—strict numerical legal mandates for IAQ in public spaces. On the other side, a response from the folks at ISO TC 146 SC 6 and ASTM D22, raising a critical point: is a global mandate actually workable, or even dangerous? What happens when you apply a Western technological fix to a context that simply cannot support it?

Indoor Environmental Quality—The Big Brother of IAQ: Intellectually, it makes sense. We have eyes, ears, skin, as well as lungs. But I'm terrified that air quality is going to get lost in this mix. We've spent decades trying to get people to care about the invisible. Now compare that to thermal comfort—if the room is two degrees too cold, complaints light up instantly. If we bundle IAQ into IEQ, my fear is the budget goes to the things people complain about. The money goes to new LED lighting, sound dampening panels, heat pumps—and the ventilation? Well, as long as nobody's fainting, we'll value-engineer the filters.

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: Reflections from Vegas and the Sealed Box Experiment
00:03:24 The Global Commission on Healthy Indoor Air: Progress or Narrative Grab?
00:04:47 Who's Missing from the Table? The Representation Problem
00:06:02 The Narrative Grab: When Air Quality Goes Mainstream
00:08:13 The Premium Product Problem: Clean Air as a Luxury Good
00:13:04 The Mandate Debate: Science Paper vs. Practical Reality
00:15:51 The Parachute Solution: Why One-Size-Fits-All Standards May Fail
00:19:00 Indoor Environmental Quality: The Marvel Movie Problem
00:24:38 The Broken Delivery System: When Platinum Buildings Fail
00:28:12 The Path Forward: From Talking Shops to Ground Truth

This week, we tackle a question that goes beyond sensors, standards, and science: Do you trust the people telling you the air is bad? And more importantly—does that trust, or lack of it, actually change what you do about it?

The paper is titled Communicating Particulate Matter Risk: The Effects of Empoweredness and Trust in Government Information and Protective Behaviour, published in the International Journal of Urban Sciences, and based on research conducted in Seoul, South Korea.

The Central Question

We know air pollution is a killer—7 million premature deaths a year globally. Governments know this too. They push out information: air quality indexes, apps, text alerts, and behaviour recommendations. Wear a mask. Don't exercise outdoors. But here's the problem: not everyone listens. Even when the information is right there in front of them, people don't always take protective action. Why is that?

This paper argues that the traditional models of risk communication—focusing on threat perception and efficacy—are missing something crucial: trust in the messenger.

The Big Takeaway

The study found that trust in government information acts as a moderator—a boundary condition. For people with low trust in the government's information, it didn't matter how much hope they had or how much they believed their mask could work. If they didn't trust the source, those feelings didn't translate into action.

Trust unlocks the potential of the other motivations. It allows an individual's sense of empowerment to actually extend into behavioural change.

Key Insights:

Empoweredness Goes Beyond Individual Efficacy: The paper introduces an expanded concept of empoweredness that includes hope (visualizing a future with clean air), values (believing it's meaningful to reduce pollution), and collective response efficacy (believing we can fix this together as a society).

Values Matter: People were more likely to take action if they felt that reducing PM was a worthwhile or meaningful thing to do—not just about self-preservation, but about environmental stewardship and intrinsic value.

Hope Only Works With Trust: For people with low trust, hope might just be wishful thinking or even a form of denial. But with trust, hope becomes a driver for action.

Collective Efficacy Needs a Trusted Conductor: Believing society can handle the risk only led to personal action if the person trusted the government information. People need to feel that the conductor of the orchestra is competent and honest before they're willing to play their part.

Citizen Science as a Trust-Building Tool: By involving the public in data collection—giving them sensors, letting them see the data for themselves—you increase transparency. When people participate in the science, they trust the data. And when they trust the data, they're more likely to listen when you tell them how to protect themselves.

Communicating Particulate Matter Risk: The Effects of Empoweredness and Trust in Government Information and Protective Behaviour

https://doi.org/10.1080/12265934.2024.2344456

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Psychology of Trust in Air Quality
00:01:10 The Seoul Laboratory: Why This Study Matters Globally
00:01:39 The Information Paradox: Why Data Doesn't Equal Action
00:02:18 Beyond Fear: The Extended Parallel Process Model
00:03:10 Empoweredness: The Missing Piece of the Puzzle
00:03:40 The Secret Sauce: Trust in Government Information
00:04:00 The Research Results: What 513 Citizens Revealed
00:04:50 Values and Meaning: The Power of Intrinsic Motivation
00:05:52 The Trust Boundary: When Hope and Efficacy Turn On or Off
00:06:46 The Implications: Why Technical Proof Isn't Enough
00:07:53 Collective Efficacy and the Orchestra Conductor
00:08:25 Building Trust: Citizen Science as a Solution
00:09:43 The Big Takeaway: Engineers Must Become Trust Builders