Abstract
Recent research has demonstrated that conducting safety observations increases the safety performance of the observer. The purpose of this study was to help determine whether observers make self-verbalizations regarding their own safety performance and whether these reports are functionally related to safety performance. In order to answer these questions two experiments were conducted using both protocol analysis and the silent dog method. The objective of Experiment 1 was (a) to determine whether safety performance with continuous, concurrent talk-aloud procedures is functionally equivalent to safety performance without talk-aloud reports, and (b) to determine whether that safety performance is altered when participants are presented with a distracter task. The goal of Experiment 2 was to determine whether the safety-related verbalizations made by Experiment 1 participants were task-relevant and functionally related to safety performance. The results from both Experiments 1 and 2 provide support for the existence of a functional relationship between safety-related verbalizations and increases in safety performance.
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The research presented in this manuscript was part of the first author’s dissertation work at Western Michigan University, which was funded, in part, by the Western Michigan University Graduate College Travel and Research Grant. Some of the data from this paper were previously presented at the 29th Annual Convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis in San Francisco, CA.
The authors would like to extend many thanks to all of the research assistants who helped with the extensive data collection process.
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Alvero, A.M., Austin, J. An Implementation of Protocol Analysis and the Silent Dog Method in the Area of Behavioral Safety. Analysis Verbal Behav 22, 61–79 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03393027
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03393027