Eliciting Expertise, Harvesting, and Representing Knowledge

The exploration of human communication and its consequences to aviation safety delivers a knowledge framework, configuring this chapter. A bottom-up approach from qualitative data gathering to relation identification between actions and interactions with iteration and refinement is described and allows core concepts to emerge with theoretical sensitivity, using a rich depository of data guided by grounded theory (GT). This chapter explains the core concept of situation awareness (local, transitory, and global) as the catalyst of “what we need to know” for aviation safety. Preconceptions, interviews, questioning tools, and an Ishikawa diagram are analyzed, considering operations, cultural, technical, and commercial parameters in aviation realities. A GT approach is the guiding path to knowledge construction through notions of perception, comprehension, projection, sorting, comparing, coding, and reenactment. GT immersion in the data searches for the following knowledge-construction elements: (i) the relevant conditions in which participants act in the various flight-related situations, (ii) how the actors respond to changing conditions and unexpected events, (iii) what are the consequences of their actions or lack of action, and (iv) what is the essence of expertise in critical environments (i.e., the expert complies to the “letter of the rule” and to the “spirit of the rule” or deviates when he/she identifies an exception or exceptional case). Lastly, four schematic figures offer a picturesque description of the above steps of inquiry, depicting the backbone of the study for this book, while cross-references “connect the dots.” The textual aspects found in the experts’ replies are interpreted using with discourse analysis and close reading guidelines.