Using shared priorities to measrue shared situation awareness

While the concept of situation awareness have received a lot of attention over the past 15 years and many different measures have been developed and tested, the concepts of team situation awareness and shared situation awareness have not gotten as much attention and less progress has been made in developing a meaningful and validated measure. Thus, the purpose of this study is to operationalize the concept of shared situation awareness and test its consequences and relation to other concepts. In this study a new measure for shared situation awareness was developed and its potential evaluated. The measure was a shared priorities measure where the participants of the study each wrote down and rank ordered five factors they thought were important for good team performance in the situation. The factors were then scrambled and handed over to the other participant who once again ordered them according to priority. The correspondence between the two participants' ratings was hypothesized to correlate with shared situation awareness. The results show that the shared priorities measure in this study did not relate to shared situation awareness. Several methodological concerns was identified which could have affected the results. The measure did relate to subjective ratings of cooperation which is very interesting and it is suggested that the measure captured aspects of teamwork. The shared priorities measure was easy to employ, required little preparation, has a high face-validity and is a promising addition to team research.