Our multisystem approach addressed the recruitment of African American families with a chronically, physically ill member. The approach focused on the social transactions between the family, the healthcare team, and the research staff, and the influence of these transactions on family recruitment. This multisystem approach included three core strategies: defining the membership of families in a culturally appropriate fashion and engaging those members; engaging the healthcare team; and building and maintaining the skills and morale of the research staff. A description of a longitudinal family health study and potential sources of recruitment biases is provided. Descriptive and bivariate analyses examined the effectiveness of the recruitment approach. A focus groups explored the reciprocal process of family protectiveness that both facilitated and hindered family recruitment and the research staff's alliance with families and the dialysis staff. Discussion focuses on the family health study's recruitment rate, sampling biases, and methods for improving the effectiveness of the multisystem recruitment approach.
Designers of commercial aviation flight decks have recently begun to consider ways to reduce or eliminate the use of paper documents in flight operations. Using ethnographic methods we describe the cognitive functions served by the paper-use practices of pilots. The special characteristics of flight deck work give a distinctive quality to pilots' paper-use practices. The complex high-stakes high-tempo nature of pilots' work makes shared understandings essential to safe flight. This means that representation of flight critical information must not only be available to both pilots, but available to the pilots jointly in interaction with one another. The cross-cultural component of our work shows how language and culture color all of the pilots' practices and how interaction with paper objects allows actors to build social identities and social relations.
In this paper, we describe an integrative approach to understanding flight crew activity. Our approach combines contemporary innovations in cognitive science theory with a new suite of methods for measuring, analyzing, and visualizing the activities of commercial airline flight crews in interaction with the complex automated systems found on the modern flight deck. Our unit of analysis is the multiparty, multimodal activity system. We installed a variety of recording devices in high-fidelity flight simulators to produce rich, multistream time-series data sets. The complexity of such data sets and the need for manual coding of high-level events make large-scale analysis prohibitively expensive. We break through this analysis bottleneck by using our newly developed integrated software system called ChronoViz, which supports visualization and analysis of multiple sources of time-coded data, including multiple sources of high-definition video, simulation data, transcript data, paper notes, and eye gaze data. Four examples of flight crew activity serve to illustrate the methods, the theory, and the kinds of findings that are now possible in the study of flight crew interaction with flight deck automation.
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