Evaluation of a virtual training environment for aggression de-escalation

Public transport employees are confronted with aggressive behavior on a regular basis. As such encounters can have serious consequences, employees need to be well prepared, so that they know how to deal with incidents of aggression. The current paper describes an ongoing endeavor that is aimed at the development and evaluation of a simulation-based training environment for public transport employees, by which they can practice their verbal aggression de-escalation skills during face-to-face conversations. A prototype of the training environment is presented, as well as an experiment to evaluate the environment in several steps. The results indicate that the prototype is evaluated positively with respect to user satisfaction, whereas there is room for improvement with respect to learning effectiveness.