Psychophysiology, task complexity, and team factors determine emergency response teams' shared beliefs

In field settings where the objective truth is not known, the extent to which you have the same understanding of the situation as your team leader may be used as an indicator for a team’s situation awareness. Two experiments showed emergency response team members’ degree of shared beliefs (measured as a ‘similarity index’) to be associated with which team they are in, but not with which position they have in the team. This indicates that factors specific to the teams, e.g. the leader’s behavior, the team’s shared experience, or communication patterns, are important for a team’s situation awareness. In the second experiment, task complexity was manipulated with a scripted scenario design and heart rate variability was measured as an indicator of executive function. Shared beliefs were shown to be associated with the degree of high frequency modulation of heart rate variability. Further, shared beliefs were associated with the designed task complexity for some teams. The experiments showed no association between the measure of shared beliefs and subjective reports of situation awareness

Developing a context-general self-report approach to measuring three-level situation awareness

Background: Situation awareness (SA) is considered to be crucial for work in safety critical organisations, yet its precise definition and an agreed upon measurement approach have yet to emerge. SA is often measured as an operator’s overview of some specific parameters within a given work setting and a given time frame, an approach that entails both advantages and disadvantages. The current approach examines whether some aspects of SA relating to workplace safety can also be captured in a context-general inventory. Material and methods: 166 offshore maritime personnel answered the SA inventory with 13 items describing the respondent’s typical cognitions concerning safety issues. Results: Confirmatory factor analysis of response patterns showed that the internal pattern among the items reflected the three level structure predicted by the leading theoretical model. Strengths and weaknesses of the inventory itself, as well as the approach in general are discussed, and future research directions are outlined. Conclusions: It appears feasible to measure aspects of SA in a context-general inventory, though additional adjustment and validation is required.publishedVersio

Developing a context-general self-report approach to measure three-level situation awareness

Background: Situation awareness (SA) is considered to be crucial for work in safety critical organisations,yet its precise definition and an agreed upon measurement approach have yet to emerge. SA is oftenmeasured as an operator’s overview of some specific parameters within a given work setting and a giventime frame, an approach that entails both advantages and disadvantages. The current approach examineswhether some aspects of SA relating to workplace safety can also be captured in a context-general inventory.Material and methods: 166 offshore maritime personnel answered the SA inventory with 13 items describingthe respondent’s typical cognitions concerning safety issues.Results: Confirmatory factor analysis of response patterns showed that the internal pattern among the itemsreflected the three level structure predicted by the leading theoretical model. Strengths and weaknesses of theinventory itself, as well as the approach in general are discussed, and future research directions are outlined.Conclusions: It appears feasible to measure aspects of SA in a context-general inventory, though additionaladjustment and validation is required

Realistic Expectations and Prosocial Behavioural Intentions to the Early Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Norwegian Population

The coronavirus pandemic represents a serious challenge for modern societies. Individuals’ perception of risk influences their choice of action, and their collective actions determine the societal impact of the pandemic. The current data paper presents descriptive statistics of a survey from a representative sample of Norwegian citizens (N = 4,083), collected in the early phases of the pandemic (March 20-29, 2020). Most of the population considered the risk for being infected to be small and the risk for becoming seriously ill to be smaller still. On the other hand, most were worried that family members could be infected, and that their daily life could change drastically. The majority of participants were optimistic that they could handle the challenges that the virus would bring, and that they would receive good medical treatment if they were to become sick. Almost all stated that they intended to comply with the authorities’ advice for limiting the contagion. Most stated that following the advice would be effective in preventing themselves and others from becoming sick. Most stated being careful in how they gather information about the pandemic. The survey showed that the Norwegian population at the time had realistic perceptions of risks, optimistic attitudes and intentions for prosocial behaviour that would limit the pandemic spread.publishedVersio

Ship Leadership, Situation Awareness, and Crew Safety Behaviour—Preregistered Replications in Two Survey Datasets

Situation awareness is often assumed to be crucial for working safely. Self-reported context-general measures can be an efficient way to measure situation awareness in large datasets and test how it relates to other individual, organizational, and environmental variables. In a previous structural equation model (Sætrevik & Hystad, 2017) authentic leadership accounted for situation awareness and self-report of committing unsafe actions, while situation awareness accounted for subjective risk assessment and commitment of unsafe actions. The current study performed preregistered replications of the same associations in two novel but similar datasets. Both datasets replicated that higher situation awareness was associated with fewer unsafe actions and with lower subjective risk assessment. One of the new datasets measured leadership, and more authentic leadership was found to be associated with higher situation awareness and fewer unsafe actions. The preregistered structural equation models explained large amounts of the variance in situation awareness and unsafe actions and medium to large amounts of the variance in subjective risk assessment. We also tested adjusted models that incorporated more of the measured items and improved the validity of the measures. The study supports the claim that a crewmember’s cognitive states (such as perception, understanding, and prediction of safety signals) are associated with safety outcomes and that leadership qualities may facilitate this relationship. This preregistered replication in two novel datasets increases the reliability of the previously identified relationships.publishedVersio

Motivational factors were more important than perceived risk or optimism for compliance to infection control measures in the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic

Compliance to infection control measures may be influenced both by the fear of negative consequences of a pandemic, but also by the expectation to be able to handle the pandemic’s challenges. We performed a survey on a representative sample for Norway (N = 4,083) in the first weeks of the COVID-19 lock-down in March 2020. We had preregistered hypotheses to test the effect of optimism and perceived risk on compliance. Perceived risk had small effects on increasing compliance and on leading to more careful information gathering. The expected negative association between optimism and compliance was not supported, and there was instead a small positive association. We found a small effect that optimism was associated with seeing less risk from the pandemic and with a larger optimistic bias. Finally, an exploratory analysis showed that seeing the infection control measures as being effective in protecting others explained a substantial proportion of the variation in compliance. The study indicates that how we think about pandemic risk has complex and non-intuitive relationships with compliance. Our beliefs and motivations toward infection control measures appears to be important for compliance.publishedVersio

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Can Survey Measures Predict Key Performance Indicators of Safety? Confirmatory and Exploratory Analyses of the Association Between Self-Report and Safety Outcomes in the Maritime Industry

Safety management may be improved if managers implement measures based on reliable empirical knowledge about how psychological factors cause or prevent accidents. While such factors are often investigated with self-report measures, few studies in the maritime industry have investigated whether self-report measures predict objectively registered accidents. The current pre-registered study used structural equation modelling to test whether “Safety attitude,” “Situation awareness,” “Reporting attitude” and “Safe behaviour” predicted “Number of reports” and “Number of safety events” in the following year. The study was conducted among crew on chemical tanker vessels operating in Arctic and Baltic waters. The pre-registered model of expected associations between self-reported safety factors and recorded safety outcomes was not supported. However, an exploratory model based on the pre-registered hypotheses supported an association between self-reported “Safe behaviour” and the overall number of recorded safety outcomes. While much safety research in the maritime industry builds on the assumption that self-reported behaviour, attitude or cognitions are causally related to actual accidents, the current study shows that such a relationship can be difficult to confirm. Until more conclusive studies are performed, the assumed causal relationship between self-reported psychological factors and safety outcomes should be treated with caution.publishedVersio

Fatigue in seafarers working in the offshore oil and gas re-supply industry: effects of safety climate, psychosocial work environment and shift arrangement

This study examined the influence of safety climate and psychosocial work environment on the reportedfatigue of seafarers working in the offshore oil and gas re-supply industry (n = 402). We found that seafarerswho reported high psychological demands and perceived the organisational-level safety climate negatively,reported significantly more mental fatigue, physical fatigue, and lack of energy. In addition, seafarers whoreported having high levels of job control reported being significantly less mentally fatigued. We also foundsome combined effects of safety climate and shift arrangement. Organisational-level safety climate did notinfluence the levels of physical fatigue in seafarers working on the night shift. On the contrary, seafarersworking during the days reported to be more physically fatigued when they perceived the organisational-levelclimate to be negative compared with the positive. The opposite effect was found for group-level safetyclimate: seafarers working during the nights reported to be more physically fatigued when they perceivedthe group-level climate to be negative compared with the positive. The results from this study point to theimportance of taking into consideration aspects of the psychosocial work environment and safety climate,and their potential impact on fatigue and safety in the maritime organisations

Fatigue in seafarers working in the offshore oil and gas re-supply industry: effects of safety climate, psychosocial work environment and shift arrangement

This study examined the influence of safety climate and psychosocial work environment on the reported fatigue of seafarers working in the offshore oil and gas re-supply industry (n = 402). We found that seafarers who reported high psychological demands and perceived the organisational-level safety climate negatively, reported significantly more mental fatigue, physical fatigue, and lack of energy. In addition, seafarers who reported having high levels of job control reported being significantly less mentally fatigued. We also found some combined effects of safety climate and shift arrangement. Organisational-level safety climate did not influence the levels of physical fatigue in seafarers working on the night shift. On the contrary, seafarers working during the days reported to be more physically fatigued when they perceived the organisational-level climate to be negative compared with the positive. The opposite effect was found for group-level safety climate: seafarers working during the nights reported to be more physically fatigued when they perceived the group-level climate to be negative compared with the positive. The results from this study point to the importance of taking into consideration aspects of the psychosocial work environment and safety climate, and their potential impact on fatigue and safety in the maritime organisations.publishedVersio