Assessing team focused behaviors in emergency response teams using the shared priorities measure

The purpose of this work in progress paper is to report on the method development of the Shared Priorities measure to include content analysis, as a way of gaining a deeper understanding of team work in crisis/emergency response. An experiment is reported where the performance of six trained teams is compared with the performance of six non-trained teams. The experiment was performed using an emergency response microworld simulation with a forest fire scenario. Dependent measures were simulation performance, the Crew Awareness Rating Scale (CARS), and content analysis. Trained teams performed better and scored higher on measures of team behaviors.