Kathryn Woodcock
Archive
Some of my current work is an extension of some older projects. These links may help to track down some of the more difficult to locate items.
What are the temperament characteristics of safety specialists?
Temperament tests, or personality type, is a common component of career counselling. This research program looked at temperament of several samples of safety specialists and compared the results to results reported in the population as a whole.
Does the word "accident" indicate pessimism about prevention?
From time to time, concern is expressed about use of the word “accident”. One concern is based on the reasoning that the term means or is believed to mean “unpreventable”. This paper summarizes the main components of the word’s definition and reports on a content analysis over 12 days of print media usage (summer 2001 and spring 2002) to examine the actual usage of the term. Implications for research and professional usage and public discourse are considered.
Causal Reasoning in Industrial Safety Specialists
Doctor of Philosophy 1996. Department of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering. University of Toronto.
Causal explanations determine how
industry acts to prevent accident recurrence. Little is
known about industrial accident cause-finding practices.
The present study elicited causal schemas from sixteen
practicing safety specialists and observed how they are
used to reach causal explanations. The present research
method provided all subjects with the same tasks and
observed how their differences lead them to interpret the
problems differently. There were no task-imposed limits
on hypothesis revision and closure. In addition to
walkthrough accounts of subjects’ own experiences,
methods were developed to use a non-interactive exercise
and interactive simulated investigations to elicit
schemas. Knowledge sources and organizational factors
were also surveyed from the subjects, and effects of
these variables on schemas and investigations were
examined.
_The
causal knowledge elicited from safety specialists is not
significantly increased by education, involvement in peer
organizations, or length of experience. While this does
not contradict the presence of expertise among
practitioners, it does not confirm it.
_Diverse
definitions of ‘bias’ were considered. No
evidence of the fundamental attribution error was
observed, nor did the investigation approaches resemble
attribution judgements. Generating and using
management/design causal explanations more than
worker-oriented explanations does reflect current
explanatory fashions, although the self-serving bias is
the one that best describes the observed effects. Safety
specialists are conscious of the values of company
operations and their accident investigations show its
effects. Holding the top safety position and
responsibility for managing workers’ compensation
are associated with increased affinity to worker-oriented
explanations and investigation characteristics that
favour them.
_The
methods used to elicit causal knowledge were effective
and well accepted by the subjects. Attribution-style
experiments to explore causal biases in industrial
accident investigation would not be supported by the
present findings.
_Real-time
transcription produced accurate interview transcripts
quickly and enabled a deaf researcher to have lengthy,
technical discussions with non-signing hearing subjects
without communication barriers.
Bias in Real-world Accident Cause-finding.
Woodcock, K. (1995) Advances in Industrial Ergonomics and Safety. Bittner, A.C. & Champney, P. (Eds.) London: Taylor & Francis pp. 907–911.
Regardless of the actual causal processes of particular accidents, it is the causes identified by the analyst which determine what responses arise, and how safety is managed in industry. However, some beliefs have been expressed that cause-finding might incorporate predictable types of bias, notably derived from particular motivations as well as common cognitive phenomena. The two major models used to understand the cause-finding process are the attribution model and the diagnosis model. Although experimentally convenient, the attribution model is sufficiently different from the real world cause-finding task that its validity may be questioned, thus these findings need further verification. Others have characterized accident cause-finding as a diagnostic exercise, which introduces another dimension, consisting of time, search sequence, and stopping criteria. Although diagnosis does correspond better with the task of cause-finding, little is known about the real-world accident causal search process. Some debiasing principles exist but in order to make effective use of these, we need to know more about the task and what biases occur, and when, where, and how they intrude.
Foolproofing: How real-world causal reasoning works against ergonomics
Woodcock, K. (1999) Proceedings of the Association of Canadian Ergonomists, October 1999, Hull QC. [CD-ROM]
The investigation of the 1997 Paris accident and death of the Princess of Wales provides insights into real-world causal reasoning. While the public and official discourse reviewed many factors, opportunities for prevention through ergonomics were omitted. Furthermore, these omissions did not elicit a reaction from the ergonomic community, suggesting that ergonomists themselves may be susceptible to real-world reasoning phenomena. This paper discusses the discourse on causation of the accident, with reference to three selected hypotheses, and ergonomic preventive measures—foolproofing—that could have been, but were not, mentioned.
Ergonomics and automatic speech recognition applications for deaf and hard-of-hearing users
K. Woodcock, 1997. Technology and Disability (Vol: 7, Issue: 3) pp. 147-164.
The potential of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for deaf and hard-of-hearing people has been recognized. This paper reviews the use environment for the deaf and hard-of-hearing person and an ASR device, using ergonomic analysis techniques. Within the deaf and hard-of-hearing population, there are many interpersonal differences, stemming from audiological and rehabilitation characteristics and social and occupational settings. Some members of the population may find ASR devices inadequate or prefer other communication aids. Environmental characteristics, particularly noise and light, affect ASR device use. The technology of automatic speech recognition itself introduces device limitations and challenges. In ergonomic analysis, these three aspects -- user, environment and device -- are connected by the task, in this case the communication task. Deaf and hard-of-hearing users need to communicate with many different people, ranging from intimate associates to perfect strangers and disembodied voices. They need to communicate in one-to-one situations and in groups both small and large. In many of these communication settings, relationships are more important than information and use of ASR would interfere with valuable eye contact as much as aid communication. Imposing order on many communication settings is problematic, but multiple conversations and interruptions create interference with selecting the correct signal to transcribe.
A related paper was presented at the Lovejoy Symposium co-sponsored by University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology in 1996
Accidents and Injuries and Ergonomics: A review of theory and practice.
Woodcock, K. (1989) Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Human Factors Association of Canada, 1–10.
The ergonomist often examines occupational injuries and illnesses to seek priorities (or justification) for future scientific inquiry or systems analysis and problem solving. The safety of an occupational system can indeed be traced to its ergonomic characteristics. However, the ergonomist is often unaware that common means of measuring ‘safety’ reflect many confounding factors. To discard safety outcomes as indicators of ‘ergonomic’ design quality would be extreme, but the ergonomist using data on injuries and illnesses should be sensitive to and prepared for confounding issues. There are some approaches that have proven effective; other uses of injury data may need to be foregone altogether. For many purposes, alternative approaches to safety may be more efficient than analysis of past accidents.
Causal explanation knowledge base of occupational safety practitioners
K. Woodcock, A.M. Smiley, 1996. Proceedings of Human Factors Association of Canada.
Sixteen occupational safety specialists were interviewed and performed exercises designed to elicit contents of their knowledge base of causal explanations. The main characteristics observed are a heterogeneous causal taxonomy, the predominance of ambiguity, and a contradiction between a commitment to ‘root causes’ and the apparent operational superficiality of this concept.
Organizational pressures and accident investigation
K. Woodcock, A.M. Smiley, 1998. Proceedings of Human Factors Association of Canada.
Investigating accidents is a common job responsibility of safety specialists largely neglected by researchers. Conventional wisdom suggests practitioners are affected by their organizational role and pressures within their employment situation. Sixteen practitioners performed simulated investigations and other exercises to elicit causal knowledge and reasoning. This analysis addresses the relationships between the elicited causal knowledge and the practitioners’ organizational context. Other patterns observed in their approaches to investigation were interpreted in light of the pressures of the organizational employment. While other analysis in the larger study had failed to support other types of bias, the self-serving bias of a corporate survivor was not discounted. To avoid biased accident investigations, companies should ensure investigators are insulated from several forms of organizational pressures.
Factors affecting the classes of causal explanations by industrial safety specialists
K. Woodcock, A.M. Smiley, 1997. Advances in Industrial Ergonomics and Safety. Das,B. & Karwowski, W. (Eds.) Amsterdam: IOS Press/Ohmsha pp.69-72.
Causal explanations determine how industry acts to prevent accident recurrence. Little is known about industrial accident cause-finding practices. Sixteen practicing safety specialists performed three common tasks: walkthrough accounts of subjects' own experiences, non-interactive exercises and interactive simulated investigations to elicit schemas. Analysis examined the relation of individual differences in knowledge sources and organizational factors to the causal concepts retrieved and the process of reasoning. Particular interest was taken in influences on the retrieval and use of worker-related causal factors and management or design-related causal factors.
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