Observational assessment of situation awareness, team differences and training implications

Abstract

The two goals were to investigate, first, the practicability and reliability of observational assessment of team situation awareness (SA) and, second, the nature of any team differences, their consistency and training implications. Five shift teams tackled three scenarios, each with three probe events concerning SA, and three observers viewed and rated concurrently each shift. This methodology was found to be practicable and achieved satisfactory rater reliability as indicated by intraclass and inter-rater correlations. Team differences in SA emerged although there was no consistent pattern. A retrospective analysis of individual and team behaviours relating to SA was performed using the Critical Incident Technique. A total of 75 incidents and 20 behavioural dimensions relevant to SA were identified and these were subsumed under planning, problem solving, team coordination, attention, communication and knowledge. These findings are discussed with regard to the nature and measurement of SA, and the content of training to improve SA for control room teams.

Distributed situation awareness

“…The dynamic nature of SA phenomena means they change moment by moment, in light of changes in the task, environment and interactions (both social and technological). These changes need to be tracked in real time if the phenomena are to be understood (Patrick et al 2006). DSA is considered to be activated knowledge for a specific task within a system at a specific time by specific agents, that is, the human and non-human actors in a system.…”

How to recognise a kick: A cognitive task analysis of drillers’ situation awareness during well operations

“…The SA components in the account mirror those identified in other high-risk, high reliability domains, e.g. nuclear power control operators (Patrick, James, Ahmed & Halliday, 2006), aviation (Lini, Vallespir, Hourlier, Labat & Favier, 2013) and surgery (Wauben et al, 2011).…”

A situation awareness analysis scheme to identify deficiencies of complex man-machine interactions

“…Consequently, the term 'situation awareness' is widely used in commercial and military aviation (Endsley, 1993(Endsley, , 1999Wickens, 2002), air traffic control (Mogford, 1997;Niessen and Eyferth, 2001), process control (Kaber and Endsley, 1998;Patrick et al, 2006) and traffic operations (Roth et al, 2006;Wiersma, 2010). In the fields of aviation, air traffic control and process control, various theories of SA have been developed.…”