TY - JOUR
T1 - Improving situation awareness in crisis response teams
T2 - An experimental analysis of enriched information and centralized coordination
AU - Van de Walle, Bartel
AU - Brugghemans, Bert
AU - Comes, Tina
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - In responding to an emergency, the actions of emergency response teams critically depend upon the situation awareness the team members have acquired. Situation awareness, and the design of systems to support it, has been a focus in recent emergency management research. In this paper, we introduce two interventions to the core processes of information processing and information sharing in emergency response teams to analyze their effect on the teams’ situation awareness: (1) we enrich raw incoming information by adding a summary of the information received, and (2) we channel all incoming information to a central coordinator who then decides upon further distribution within the team. The effect of both interventions is investigated through a controlled experiment with experienced professional responders. Our results show distinctly different effects for information enrichment and centralization, both for the teams and for the coordinators within the team. While the interaction effects of both conditions cannot be discerned, it is apparent that processing non-enriched information and non-centralized information sharing leads to a worse overall team situation awareness. Our work suggests several implications for the design of emergency response management information systems.
AB - In responding to an emergency, the actions of emergency response teams critically depend upon the situation awareness the team members have acquired. Situation awareness, and the design of systems to support it, has been a focus in recent emergency management research. In this paper, we introduce two interventions to the core processes of information processing and information sharing in emergency response teams to analyze their effect on the teams’ situation awareness: (1) we enrich raw incoming information by adding a summary of the information received, and (2) we channel all incoming information to a central coordinator who then decides upon further distribution within the team. The effect of both interventions is investigated through a controlled experiment with experienced professional responders. Our results show distinctly different effects for information enrichment and centralization, both for the teams and for the coordinators within the team. While the interaction effects of both conditions cannot be discerned, it is apparent that processing non-enriched information and non-centralized information sharing leads to a worse overall team situation awareness. Our work suggests several implications for the design of emergency response management information systems.
KW - Coordination
KW - Crisis response
KW - Fast-burning crisis
KW - Information sharing
KW - Situation awareness
UR - http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7752719b-3bb4-4711-8690-323538a002f9
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84969528725&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.05.001
DO - 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.05.001
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84969528725
SN - 1071-5819
VL - 95
SP - 66
EP - 79
JO - International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
JF - International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
ER -