Situation Awareness

Situation awareness is one of the fuzzier constructs of human factors psychology. Barton and Rousseau (2003) give a summary of the many definitions that have been proposed for SA. For this post, we’ll use Mica Endsley’s definition, which states that SA is a combination of three levels of knowledge regarded a situation:

Perception of data. How well do you know what things are in your environment? E.g., Enemy aircraft releases chaff.
Comprehension of meaning. How well do you know what those things entail for your situation? E.g., Chaff entails that guided missiles may not find target.
Projection of future situation. Given your knowledge of the situation’s elements and their meaning, how well can you predict future events? E.g., After some time, enemy aircraft will be depleted of chaff, and then you can fire a missile.

There are several ways of measuring situational awareness, with two specific ways listed below:

Situational Awareness Global Tool Assessment Technique (SAGAT): Run participants through some real-world task or a simulation of the task. At various times, stop participants and probe them of their knowledge of the situation. E.g., for flight, this may include aspects such as bearing and elevation (Endsley, 2017).
Goal-directed task analysis (GDTA): This doesn’t measure SA itself, but rather the goal structure of the situation. A GDTA has been suggested as a means of establishing a baseline against which SA reports can be compared. The GDTA involves breaking the task down into goals and subgoals, and is thus said to be technology-agnostic (Wright, Taekman, & Endsley 2009).

Endsley, M. R. (2017). Direct measurement of situation awareness: Validity and use of SAGAT. In Situational Awareness (pp. 129-156). Routledge.

Reason, J., (1990). Human error. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.