Situation awareness (SA) plays a key role in decision quality and performance (Durso & Gronlund, 1999), and studies on SA have been widely used for aviation, medical and traffic fields, however, there is little research on application of SA to emergency management. Currently, a large body of literature shows that team situation awareness (TSA) is not a simple addition of individual situation awareness (ISA); the degree to which team members hold the same ISA is shared situation awareness (SSA) (Endsley & Jones, 2001), as for emergency rescue team, “sharing” is not the most important, but “compatible” is (Salmon et al., 2007). Social network relationship is also essential to information transmission in team: the greater network density or structure holes is, the smoother of information flow becomes (Burt, 1992; Luo, 2010).
The purpose of this study is to examine SA’s application on emergency rescue team: (1) whether ISA is not directly correlated with TSA; (2) whether SSA is correlated negatively with TSA; (3) as for dense network team, whether structure hole can moderate relationship of SSA and TSA positively; (4) as for sparse network team, whether structure hole can moderate it negatively.
There were 99 senior students of fire command department who were recruited as participants, and students were divided into 10 groups, they were asked to perform the task of transferring trapped people from collapsed building after earthquake. After finishing rescue drill, ISA of each student was measured by 7-point Situation Awareness Rating Technique (SART) questionnaire including 10 items (Taylor, 1990). TSA of each group was measured by behavior observation scale, which combined with Situational Awareness Linked Indicators Adapted to Novel Tasks (SALIANT) (Muiiiz, Stout, Bowers & Salas, 1998), the scale had 29 indicators, and during the drill, it was observed by 3 experts and filled in the scale. SSA can be calculated as similarity of ISA (Bolstad, Cuevas, Gonzalez & Schneider, 2005), in this study, SSA for each team was represented by variance of all ISAs in this team. Students were also asked to complete questionnaires concerning two types of their social network relationships: their own relationship with each other members in his team and any other pairs of members’ relationship in his team, which was developed by Burt (1992), and the relationship was rated as four levels of closeness degree.
The results showed that as to emergency rescue team: (1) ISA was not correlated with TSA: for each group, average ISA (p=.267), top 3 ISA (p=.063) and median ISA (p=.379) were all not correlated with TSA; (2) SSA was correlated negatively with TSA (p=.004): for each group, the more different of ISAs are, the higher TSA is; (3) as for dense network team, structure hole can moderate relationship of SSA and TSA positively(p=.002); (4) as for sparse network team, structure hole can moderate it negatively(p=0.066).
In conclusion, as for emergency rescue team, social network relationship can moderate the effect of different ISA on TSA. It is an innovative application on SA and a significant conclusion to formation of TSA.
Key words
situation awareness /
social network /
moderating effect /
emergency rescue team