Reliability and validity of the STQ team situation awareness questionnaire.

Abstract

Teamwork is performance-determining in aviation; therefore design decisions on novel flight guidance systems use teamwork besides individual estimates as a major criterion. The SKATE model and questionnaire has been developed to assess teamwork. The revision of the questionnaire yielded the SHAPE teamwork questionnaire (STQ), whose reliability and validity is analyzed in this paper. A study with 12 professional tower controllers has been conducted, during which airports were controlled applying a standard team situation in three simulation runs. The STQ was administered after each run. The reliability analyses showed that the Cronbach’s Alphas of all six subscales were greater than α = 0.85. The criterion and construct validity analyses, however, revealed difficulties: The scales could not be replicated and the effect patterns with external criteria also opposed the expected ones. These results highlight the need to further analyze the STQ and the construct addressed by it, to be able to soundly decide on novel flight guidance systems.