Critique of Methods Employed in Human Factors Research on VDTs

This report summarizes a review of human factors research on VDTs. The main areas of interest included workstation design, character and display design, work organization, lighting and reflectance, and visual discomfort. Experimental studies were critically reviewed for the soundness of their methodologies and conclusions. In many of the studies, there were problems of interpreting the results due to careless oversights on the part of the researcher(s), for example, the inappropriate selection of subjects or lack of a control group. Due to different subject selection strategies and different VDT parameters, the integration and generalization of research results is difficult.