Radio dispatchers' interruption recovery strategies

A field study was conducted at the British Transport Police Control Room in London. We used The Critical Decision Method (CDM) to explore radio dispatchers' cue identification, situation awareness and integration of information, particularly when following an interruption. The data from the CDM interviews was also analysed using the Emergent Themes Analysis (ETA) approach. The ETA resulted in categorizing difficulties that are shared by all radio dispatchers during high workload. Based on the ETA results, we conducted another set of CDM interviews which focus particularly in interruption recovery. The CDM gave us a clear idea of what information radio dispatchers need to recover from interruptions. We found that radio dispatchers are almost unaffected by interruptions and have developed two main interruption recovery strategies.

[1]  Ann Blandford,et al.  Situation awareness in emergency medical dispatch , 2004, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[2]  Thomas L. Seamster,et al.  A Skill-Based Cognitive Task Analysis Framework , 2000 .

[3]  Ronald A. Rensink.  Change detection. , 2002, Annual review of psychology.

[4]  Ute Fischer,et al.  Informed by knowledge : expert performance in complex situations , 2011 .

[5]  Kenneth D. Forbus,et al.  Making intelligent systems team players: Case studies and design issues. Volume 1: Human-computer interaction design , 1991 .

[6]  Mica R. Endsley,et al.  Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems , 1995, Hum. Factors.

[7]  Robert Hutton,et al.  Decision-Centered Design: Leveraging Cognitive Task Analysis in Design , 2003 .

[8]  B. L. William Wong,et al.  The critical decision method , 2006 .

[9]  Wai On Lee.  The effects of skill development and feedback on action slips , 1993 .

[10]  Tom Rodden,et al.  Working with 'constant interruption , 1994 .

[11]  Harvey S. Smallman,et al.  Chex (Change History Explicit): New HCI Concepts for Change Awareness , 2003 .

[12]  Kara A. Latorella,et al.  The Scope and Importance of Human Interruption in Human-Computer Interaction Design , 2002, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[13]  M R Endsley,et al.  Sources of situation awareness errors in aviation. , 1996, Aviation, space, and environmental medicine.

[14]  Joseph DiVita,et al.  Verification of the Change Blindness Phenomenon While Managing Critical Events on a Combat Information Display , 2004, Hum. Factors.

[15]  C. Wickens,et al.  Applied Attention Theory , 2007 .

[16]  Harvey S. Smallman,et al.  Interruption Recovery Tools for Team Collaboration , 2007 .

[17]  Roberta Calderwood,et al.  Critical decision method for eliciting knowledge , 1989, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..

[18]  B Crandall,et al.  Critical decision method: A technique for eliciting concrete assessment indicators from the intuition of NICU nurses , 1993, ANS. Advances in nursing science.

[19]  Paula J. Durlach,et al.  Change Blindness and Its Implications for Complex Monitoring and Control Systems Design and Operator Training , 2004, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[20]  Ann Blandford,et al.  Analysing ambulance dispatcher decision making: trialing emergent themes analysis , 2002 .

[21]  David Woods,et al.  The alarm problem and directed attention in dynamic fault management , 1995 .