Crew resource management training in the maritime industry: a literature review

The study is based on a literature review of recent empirical research on crew resource management (CRM) training in the maritime industry, organised around what non-technical skills to learn and how. The review indicates that existing work is dominated by individualistic theories of learning with less focus on learning as a social process. Five main categories of skills that need to be trained are identified: assertiveness, decision-making, communication, situation awareness and team coordination. We argue that it is necessary to operationalise these broad concepts further, emphasising the work context and crew-specific needs. The review also shows that a combination of classroom lectures and simulator-based exercises is commonly used in maritime education and training in these skills. The learning effect seems to be suffering from training programmes that are exported ‘as is’ from aviation and not adjusted to the maritime domain or to operation-specific needs. This paper examines maritime crew resource management training from a social learning perspective, involving the view that learning is a context bound, social process that might take place in communities of practice (CoP). A CoP is a group (e.g. a crew) wherein members share an activity and learn from each other. It is argued that CRM training programmes will benefit from including a social learning perspective. Factors that enable the assessment of teams are discussed, and it is argued that the training should be tailored to existing crews, emphasising a learning environment as close to reality as possible.     

The link between traffic-related occurrence and annoyance

This paper examines the relationship between a respondent's estimate of a traffic-related occurrence and his/her level of annoyance with it. Factors such as traffic flow, speeding, parked cars, standard of the sidewalk, and cyclists on the sidewalk are tested. The data was collected in 2008 from a questionnaire study sent to circa 1400 residents living along four arterial streets in Malmö, Sweden. The results indicate that the respondents seem to associate the estimate of occurrence with a rather corresponding or lower level of annoyance. Deviations from these main results are mainly found for the oldest (> 64) age group where high estimate of occurrence is associated with low annoyance concerning some of the factors.     

Compliance and data quality in GPS-based studies

Recent years have witnessed a growing volume of papers describing the use of GPS technology and other tracking technologies for obtaining data on time–space activities. These methods have several advantages over traditional methods of time–space data collection in terms of accuracy, resolution and length of the possible data collection period. However, to date, no work has been done on the compliance rates among participants and the resulting validity of the collected data. This paper presents a method that combines the use of a GPS receiver with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology that was implemented in research on time–space activities of elderly persons with cognitive impairment. The method presented in this paper enables monitoring the level of compliance of the participants during their participation in the study and presents a unique opportunity to examine the extent to which participants in a GPS based study are able to comply with study requirements. Healthy older adults and those with cognitive decline were found to be generally compliant with a complex study protocol. These results serve as another step into the acceptance of GPS based studies as a valid methodology for mobility data collection.