A Review on the Foundations of Thermal Comfort Methodology in the Built Environment

Achievement of thermal comfort in the built environment is one of the human life needs. Many studies have already explored the issues around human comfort in relation to the surrounding thermal environment. However, most of these studies used quantitative methods that fall into the positivist paradigm. Despite the conducive results obtained, many aspects of the thermal comfort are neglected as the nature of comfort is directly associated with the human dimension. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a different approach such as qualitative and mixed methods to better understand the underlying mechanisms of thermal comfort concept and its achievement. These methods could reveal other aspects of human comfort that have not been considered. However, the application of these methods requires fundamental knowledge of ontology and epistemology. Therefore, this paper reviewed and compared the dynamics of the application of the paradigms in thermal comfort studies and their methodologies. Analytical findings among the methods of studying thermal comfort showed that only quantitative studies were not sufficient to create the applied knowledge in this vein. As this is a human-based field, its methodology should be first selected and then designed in the right way respecting the context where a study is going to be carried out. In this process, qualitative studies can determine contributing factors, then quantitative studies can find the relationships between these factors.