Confrontation croisée ou analyse collective sur la base de restitutions d’entretiens individuels : deux approches pour l’analyse évènementielle

Safety management in nuclear power plants involves analysing “safety events” to understand them and to reduce occurrences. For several years, an approach identifying and analysing factors included in the production of the event has been applied to EDF nuclear power plants; however some outstanding difficulties still remain.The article presents two approaches set up in the Chinon nuclear power plant:– Crossed confrontation by clinical analysis of work activityBased on the psychological conceptualization of work involved in clinical analysis of activity, we have presented the main concepts essential to the development of safety events analysis as well as the adopted method. The demonstration lies in how the psychological function of work activity, within a transpersonal dimension, can contribute to events analysis through the development and transformation of the subject, the group and the work context.– The approach through the collective restitution of individual explanation interviews:The first method requires the contribution of a party external to the event and able to contribute to the collective analysis. As the availability of such an individual was not systematic, the job of events analysis then fell on an analyst from the collective work force for whom a different approach had to be developed: collective analysis based on the restitution of individual interviews within a framework involving a sociological study. Even if the approach is very different from the first method, it is better suited to professional constraints of safety workers having held operational or maintenance jobs