Help is on the way: Effects of pre-response information and planning on communication and performance of simulated firefighting teams

Introduction

Firefighters play crucial roles for ensuring safety and health of a community by handling various types of incidents, including fire, vehicle accident, and medical emergency (US Fire Administration, 2022). A successful response to the incidents highly depends on the information fed to firefighters before they arrive at the scene (i.e., pre-response information) and the planning before taking actions against hazards (i.e., pre- response planning) (Kapalo & LaViola Jr, 2019; Li et al., 2014). Investigations of previous emergency response clearly demonstrate the needs for the pre-response information and planning activities. For example, an investigation of an ammonium nitrate explosion in West, Texas that took lives of 10 firefighters indicated that lack of awareness of the detonation hazards and lack of incident planning efforts were critical factors that led to the fatalities (US Chemical Safety Board, 2013). Despite such significant roles, there have been few attempts to examine the effects of the pre-response information and pre-response planning on firefighting teams’ team communication and performance. Thus, this project aims to address the knowledge gaps using ‘The Squad’, a computer- based firefighting simulation program.

Method

A team of three people is considered in this study to simulate a small firefighting team. Each simulated firefighting team consists of three participants recruited from a public university in Texas who have not known each other or worked with each other in the past. As shown in Figure 1, a 2x2 between-subject experimental design is employed with two independent variables.

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Figure 1.

Experimental design of the current study.

A first variable, ‘pre-response information’, has two conditions: more complete information (MC) and less complete information (LC). The completeness of the pre-response information is adjusted by the level of truth. For example, a precise number of victims (e.g., ‘there are four victims inside the house under fire’) is provided to the MC condition whereas less detailed victim information (e.g., ‘there are multiple victims in the house under fire’) is given to the LC condition. A second variable, ‘pre-response planning’, has also two conditions: structured incident planning (SP) and unstructured incident planning (UP). Accordingly, four conditions are made, and each participating team is assigned to only one of the conditions in a random fashion. In line with the literature (Son et al., 2018, 2020, 2022), team communication measures include frequency (how often), duration (how long), direction (from whom to whom), and content (what was said) of the communication between three firefighting team members.

The team communication data is collected using an audio- video recording system installed in the authors’ lab. As shown in Figure 2, individual participants, during their first visit to the lab, receive orientation and practice tutorials to learn basic control skills of the computer program. The individual participants conduct a training scenario with a low level of difficulty. Upon the completion of the training scenario, the participant is added to a pool of eligible participants. A team of three eligible participants is formed and notified to make the second visit to the lab as a team. During the second visit, the team conducts the training scenario once again as a refresher training. Then, the team is assigned to one of the experimental conditions. The team performance outcome measures include mission completion time (in seconds), perceived workload, perceived team efficacy, and perceived team trust. The mission completion time is the time taken to finish all the given missions to the firefighting team. Perceived workload is measured with NASA Task Load Index (TLX) (Hart & Staveland, 1988). Perceived team efficacy is measured using the Team Emergency Assessment Measure (TEAM) instrument (Cooper et al., 2010). And perceived team trust is assessed using a five- item global team trust scale (Colquitt et al., 2011). The collected team process and performance outcome data will be analyzed using a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to find any significant main and interaction effects (alpha=0.05).

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Figure 2.

Training and data collection procedure.

Expected Results and Implications

Currently, work is in progress to carry out the proposed research activities, including recruitment of participants and data collection through a computer-based team experiment. It is expected that pre-response information and pre-response planning would facilitate firefighting team members’ communication and improve performance outcomes. With respect to team communication, previous studies have shown conflicting findings. In general, an increased amount of team communication has been represented as a marker of enhanced teamwork (Hong et al., 2008; Moon et al., 2020). In contrast, Espevik et al. (2011) found that high-performing teams have a smaller number of conversations due to more shared mental model. Findings of the current study would reveal the traits of firefighting team communication in the presence of pre- response information and planning.

Our study is expected to reveal how pre-response information and pre-response planning influence a firefighting team’s subjective workload, trust to other team members, and perceived team efficacy. Due to the highly stressful nature of the emergency response, it is increasingly important to understand these implicit perceptions among firefighters (Duran et al., 2019). In addition, results of this research will inform the design of technical tools and response processes to support firefighting teams during the pre-response period.

There are several limitations to be noted. First, college students are recruited as participants rather than professional firefighters. Given that the firefighting simulation, ‘The Squad’, is very similar to contemporary computer games, we assumed that providing tutorials and training scenarios would be sufficient to make the participants possess necessary skills for the simulation. Further, emergency management simulation is increasingly used as an alternative and safe research platform (Dos Santos & Son, 2022). Second, firefighting team members in our study have not known or worked together. Thus, the sense of working as a team (i.e., team spirit) and shared mental model may be low. This control on pre-existing relationships, however, is necessary to increase the effects of the two pre- response interventions.