Measuring and Predicting Shared Situation Awareness in Teams

In order to improve our understanding of situation awareness (SA) in teams performing in technologically advanced command, control, and communications (C3) operations, researchers need to develop valid approaches to assess both individual and shared SA. We investigated SA in an interdisciplinary military rescue operation training exercise. For this study, we developed procedures to measure the degree of shared SA between two team members and to improve the accuracy of their shared SA scores. We suggest that SA scores that are calculated using many existing methods may be inflated because they often fail to account for error in terms of both the amount of information that is thought to be relevant and in the accuracy of a person’s knowledge of it. We calculated true SA scores that account for both of these types of error. The measures were then used to evaluate five potential predictors of shared SA. Our analysis suggested that failure to compensate for error in SA may lead to overestimation of performance in a situation. The results also revealed a significant relationship between shared SA and participants’ distance from a central, joint service team, which acted as the organizational hub within the C3 structure. Shared SA was better the further away from the hub people were, which suggests that a person’s role and position within an organization affects the level of shared SA that can be achieved with other individuals.