Aviation Human Factors

Description:

The Hazardous Attitude Scale consists of 10 scenarios depicting aviation situations that call for a timely decision on the part of the pilot and descriptions of the course of action that the depicted pilot took. Five alternative explanations of why the pilot might have taken that particular course of action are given, and participants are instructed to choose the explanation that best describes why they would have taken that action. Each of the five alternatives are written to express a specific hazardous attitude.

WARNING: Because of the small number of items and the ipsative scoring, this measures should NOT be used as a psychometric instrument. It is better applied as a teaching aid to illustrate the concepts of hazardous attitudes. For psychometric assessments of these constructs, use the ASAS or and New-HAS.

Format:

Multiple-choice. Stem consists of a scenario description. Five alternatives are available, from which the subject must choose an explanation for why a pilot would have taken the actions depicted in the scenario.

Scoring:

Ipsative. Each alternative is keyed to one of the five hazardous attitudes. Summing the keyed alternatives generates scores for each hazardous attitude. Thus, the scores of all the hazardous attitudes must sum to 10.

Factor Composition: Because of the ipsative nature of this scale and the small number of items, factor analyses (and correlations) are problematic.

Construct Validity:
Because there is no single instrument that is accepted as the standard of measurement in this area, several measures were used to evaluate the construct validity of the attitude scales, each representing slightly different convergent external constructs or measures of interest. These measures included Zuckerman’s (1994) TAS, the ASLOC (Aviation Safety Locus of Control), measures of pilots’ risk perception and risk tolerance, a measure of pilots’ situational judgment, and a measure of their involvement in hazardous aviation events including accidents.

Only 7 of the 50 correlations for the Old–HAS were statistically significant (readers should note that no attempt was made to control for experiment-wide error rate), there was no clear pattern to the significant correlations, and the largest correlation was –.213

Normative Information:

References:

Hunter, D.R. (2005). Measurement of hazardous attitudes among pilots. International Journal of Aviation Psychology, 15, 23-43.

Download the scale (Word format)