Robusthet og sikkerhet i en åpen situasjon

The aim of this study was to investigate if the evaluation of risk and safety contributes to behavior over and above measures of hardiness and resilience in an open situation. Data was collected from a survey prior to an exercise and during the exercise, in which cadets were trained to evaluate an ambiguous situation; i.e. whether or not they would like to jump into cold water from a pier in Norway. This was related to the changes officers today might face in international services, in accordance with new ways of warfare. Officers are likely to face ambiguous situations in which they are not certain about what to do, and a interesting question is whether individual characteristics or situational demands mediates behavior in such situations. This is what the exercise wanted to investigate. We measured the personality variables hardiness and resilience, and compared with concerns about safety to see to what degree it predicted that the cadet would choose to jump. Cultural differences between the 3 military academies in Norway, as well as the Police academy, was also investigated to see if the training and cultural nurture in each school accounted for some of the variance in jump rate. The results showed a significant difference in jump rates between the schools, and that there were effects on jump rate of hardiness, resilience and concerns about safety. While high scores on hardiness made it more likely that a cadet would choose to jump, cadets who scored high on resilience tended to choose not to jump. Safety evaluations contributed significantly to the amount of explained variance. Cadets high on safety evaluations tended to jump. This means that when we integrated safety evaluations in our model, more of the variance in jumping was accounted for than when only the personality characteristics hardiness and resilience were used. We conclude that in an ambiguous situation, officers' cultural background (Military Academy), personality variables, and safety evaluations all contribute to the prediction of behavior in this situation