Risk Assessment for Subjective Evidence-based Ethnography Applied in High Risk Environment: Improved Protocol

Abstract

Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE) is a family of methods developed for investigation in social science based on subjective audio-video recordings with a miniature video-camera usually worn at eye-level (eye-tracking techniques are included). Facing a lack of tools for SEBE risk assessment when applied to high risk professional environments (e.g. anesthetists, aircraft pilots, nuclear reactor pilots), a protocol (version 1.1) was successfully developed and tested in nuclear industry with N₁=59 participants and presented in a previous article. However, further cases were needed to demonstrate the robustness of the risk assessment protocol in other contexts. Further applications were thus undertaken with N₂=75 participants from Air Force army, Police, Medicine and Nuclear industry during work activities lasting from 10 minutes to several hours. SEBE equipment was worn and the original risk assessment protocol was applied and/or discussed between participants and researchers for improvement. The protocol was enriched (version 2.3): 37% items were added. This illustrated the context sensitiveness of this sort of risk assessment. Limits of this new series of tests are discussed.