Toward a Model of Team Situation Awareness

Situation Awareness (SA) is a construct that is considered important to safety in dynamic, risky, time-constrained and complex environments, such as military aviation, nuclear reactors and emergency management. Research consideration of SA is complicated by the fact that there is no clearly superior methodology for SA measurement. Typically, SA is considered at the individual level; however, the nature of the SA context often requires more than one individual for safe and effective operations. Team SA is a qualitatively different phenomenon than individual SA. Few models of team SA have been proposed. The primary purpose of this paper was to develop and test a model of team SA. Existing models of team SA were reviewed, an integrated model was put forth, and each of the models was tested. Additionally, the paper explored and compared several methods for quantitatively assessing SA. Results indicate that one measure of SA, SALIENT (Muniz et al, 1997) has the best measurement characteristics. Model testing revealed that all models put forth fit the data adequately, but the summation model yielded the best fit to the data. Implications and suggestions for future research were outlined