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Fire alarm or false alarm

Fire alarm or false alarm Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess whether firefighters display different decisionmaking biases either a liberal bias to accepting information as true or a conservative bias to rejecting information, with the former carrying risk of false alarm errors and the latter of misses.Designmethodologyapproach Situation awareness SA and decisionmaking biases were examined in Fire and Rescue FRS tabletop and Breathing Apparatus BA training exercises. The former involved showing 50 operational FRS personnel a powerpoint presentation representing the driveto, views and information related to the incident. The BA study involved 16 operational FRS personnel entering a smokefilled training building in a searchandrescue exercise. TrueFalse answers to statements about the incidents were analysed by a signaldetectiontype tool QASA to give measures of SA and bias.Findings In both studies, there were two groups showing different bias patterns either conservative with risk of miss errors, or liberal with risk of false alarms p0.001, but not different SA p>0.05.Research limitationsimplications Future work will involve more realistic training exercises and explore the consistency of individual bias tendencies over different contexts.Practical implications Risk in fireground decision making may be minimised by increasing awareness of individual tendencies to either conservative or liberal bias patterns and the associated risk of respectively making miss or false alarm errors.Social implications The results may help to minimise fireground risk.Originalityvalue This is the first evidence to show firefighter decision bias in two different exercises. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png International Journal of Emergency Services Emerald Publishing

Fire alarm or false alarm

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References (45)

Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN
2047-0894
DOI
10.1108/20470891211275920
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess whether firefighters display different decisionmaking biases either a liberal bias to accepting information as true or a conservative bias to rejecting information, with the former carrying risk of false alarm errors and the latter of misses.Designmethodologyapproach Situation awareness SA and decisionmaking biases were examined in Fire and Rescue FRS tabletop and Breathing Apparatus BA training exercises. The former involved showing 50 operational FRS personnel a powerpoint presentation representing the driveto, views and information related to the incident. The BA study involved 16 operational FRS personnel entering a smokefilled training building in a searchandrescue exercise. TrueFalse answers to statements about the incidents were analysed by a signaldetectiontype tool QASA to give measures of SA and bias.Findings In both studies, there were two groups showing different bias patterns either conservative with risk of miss errors, or liberal with risk of false alarms p0.001, but not different SA p>0.05.Research limitationsimplications Future work will involve more realistic training exercises and explore the consistency of individual bias tendencies over different contexts.Practical implications Risk in fireground decision making may be minimised by increasing awareness of individual tendencies to either conservative or liberal bias patterns and the associated risk of respectively making miss or false alarm errors.Social implications The results may help to minimise fireground risk.Originalityvalue This is the first evidence to show firefighter decision bias in two different exercises.

Journal

International Journal of Emergency Services – Emerald Publishing

Published: Oct 19, 2012

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