Episode Analysis for Evaluating Response Operations and Identifying Training Needs

In Emergency Management (EM) teams are faced with dynamic and complex situations, often involving multiple teams and organizations working together under stressful circumstances. One of the key issues observed in emergency responses is inadequate communication. The communicative difficulties stem from various areas such as political, personal or jurisdictional. In order to improve communication and coordination, we need to gain a profound understanding of what the communication problems are and, further, we need to provide meaningful inter-organizational training regimes targeting these issues. We suggest episode analysis, a qualitative research method, to better understand the communication taking place during an emergency response. Episode analysis provides a way to code and analyze data involving multiple teams and organizations as well as a way to study more informal communicative functions that would otherwise be difficult to capture. Moreover, we suggest that episode analyses can be used to identify training needs and be helpful in creating meaningful training scenarios.