Airports at Risk: The Impact of Information Sources on Security Decisions

Security decisions in high risk organizations such as airports involve obtaining ongoing and frequent information about potential threats. Utilizing questionnaire survey data from a sample of airport employees in European Airports across the continent, we analyzed how both formal and informal sources of security information affect employee's decisions to comply with the security rules and directives. This led us to trace information network flows to assess its impact on the degree employees making security decisions comply or deviate with the prescribed security rules. The results of the multivariate analysis showed that security information obtained through formal and informal networks differentially determine if employee will comply or not with the rules. Information sources emanating from the informal network tends to encourage employees to be more flexible in their security decisions while formal sources lead to be more rigid with complying with rules and protocols. These results suggest that alongside the formal administrative structure of airports, there exists a diverse and pervasiveness set of informal communications networks that are a potent factor in determining airport security levels

How Expert Is the Crowd? Insights into Crowd Opinions on the Severity of Earthquake Damage

The evaluation of earthquake damage is central to assessing its severity and damage characteristics. However, the methods of assessment encounter difficulties concerning the subjective judgments and interpretation of the evaluators. Thus, it is mainly geologists, seismologists, and engineers who perform this exhausting task. Here, we explore whether an evaluation made by semiskilled people and by the crowd is equivalent to the experts’ opinions and, thus, can be harnessed as part of the process. Therefore, we conducted surveys in which a cohort of graduate students studying natural hazards (n = 44) and an online crowd (n = 610) were asked to evaluate the level of severity of earthquake damage. The two outcome datasets were then compared with the evaluation made by two of the present authors, who are considered experts in the field. Interestingly, the evaluations of both the semiskilled cohort and the crowd were found to be fairly similar to those of the experts, thus suggesting that they can provide an interpretation close enough to an expert’s opinion on the severity level of earthquake damage. Such an understanding may indicate that although our analysis is preliminary and requires more case studies for this to be verified, there is vast potential encapsulated in crowd-sourced opinion on simple earthquake-related damage, especially if a large amount of data is to be handled

Security profiling of airport employees: Complying with the rules

Recent evidence has shown that airport security decisions frequently fail to follow rules and procedures. Investigating this phenomenon through an analysis of data garnered from ethnographic and field surveys of European airports suggests that propensity to bend or ignore the rules can be associated with three distinct airport employee types, namely the ‘adaptive’, ‘social interactive’ and ‘compliant bureaucratic’. Each employee security profile is characterised in terms of the degree of rule compliance. ‘Adaptive’ employees are likely to bend rules. ‘Social interactive’ rely primarily on group decision making, and ‘compliant bureaucratic’ are allied with the administrative and security regulations. These findings should alert security officials to the possibility of leveraging such employee profiles in terms of human resource recruitment and physical distribution within the airport organisation to take advantage of specific requirements in the operation of the airport

Airport security: An ethnographic study

This paper employs a behavioral science perspective of airport security to, examine security related decision behaviors using exploratory ethnographic observations. Sampling employees from a broad spectrum of departments and occupations in several major airports across Europe, over 700 descriptive items are transcribed into story scripts that are analyzed. The results demonstrate that both formal and informal behavioral factors are present when security decisions are made. The repetitive patterns of behavior allowed us to develop a generic model applicable to a wide range of security related situations. What the descriptions suggest is that even within the formal regulatory administrative framework of airports, actual real-time security behaviors may deviate from rules and regulations to adapt to local situations

Regular drinking may strengthen the beneficial influence of social support on depression: findings from a representative Israeli sample during a period of war and terrorism.

BackgroundSocial support is consistently associated with reduced risk of depression. Few studies have investigated how this relationship may be modified by alcohol use, the effects of which may be particularly relevant in traumatized populations in which rates of alcohol use are known to be high.MethodsIn 2008 a representative sample of 1622 Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel were interviewed by phone at two time points during a period of ongoing terrorism and war threat. Two multivariable mixed effects regression models were estimated to measure the longitudinal association of social support from family and friends on depression symptoms. Three-way interaction terms between social support, alcohol use and time were entered into the models to test for effect modification.ResultsFindings indicated that increased family social support was associated with less depression symptomatology (p=<.01); this relationship was modified by alcohol use and time (p=<.01). Social support from friends was also associated with fewer depression symptoms (p=<.01) and this relationship was modified by alcohol use and time as well (p=<.01). Stratified analyses in both models revealed that the effect of social support was stronger for those who drank alcohol regularly than those who did not drink or drank rarely.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that social support is a more important protective factor for depression among regular drinkers than among those who do not drink or drink rarely in the context of political violence. Additional research is warranted to determine whether these findings are stable in other populations and settings

Regular drinking may strengthen the beneficial influence of social support on depression: findings from a representative Israeli sample during a period of war and terrorism.

BackgroundSocial support is consistently associated with reduced risk of depression. Few studies have investigated how this relationship may be modified by alcohol use, the effects of which may be particularly relevant in traumatized populations in which rates of alcohol use are known to be high.MethodsIn 2008 a representative sample of 1622 Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel were interviewed by phone at two time points during a period of ongoing terrorism and war threat. Two multivariable mixed effects regression models were estimated to measure the longitudinal association of social support from family and friends on depression symptoms. Three-way interaction terms between social support, alcohol use and time were entered into the models to test for effect modification.ResultsFindings indicated that increased family social support was associated with less depression symptomatology (p=<.01); this relationship was modified by alcohol use and time (p=<.01). Social support from friends was also associated with fewer depression symptoms (p=<.01) and this relationship was modified by alcohol use and time as well (p=<.01). Stratified analyses in both models revealed that the effect of social support was stronger for those who drank alcohol regularly than those who did not drink or drank rarely.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that social support is a more important protective factor for depression among regular drinkers than among those who do not drink or drink rarely in the context of political violence. Additional research is warranted to determine whether these findings are stable in other populations and settings