The Aircrew Stress Study sample

Okay, enough background information for the time being. It's time to start telling you some of the things I learned from the Aircrew Stress Study. I'll begin with a brief rundown on who the participants were -- otherwise known as 'the sample.'

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the Aircrew Stress Study data were collected by means of an online survey questionnaire. Participants were recruited mainly through notices on aviation message boards, and by word of mouth.

In the end, there were 1,078 questionnaire responses. Of those, 411 were from pilots and 667 were from cabin crew.

Here are a few facts about who was in the sample:

Gender

• of the Pilots, 92% were male, and 8% were female
• of Cabin Crew, 36% were male, and 64% were female

Nationality

• Most of the respondents -- about 66% of both Pilots and Cabin Crew -- were from the United States.
• Another 20% of Cabin Crew, and 16% of the Pilots were from other countries where English is the primary language: Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

In all, Pilots of 33 different nationalities, and Cabin Crew of 44 different nationalities, responded to the survey.

If you're curious, here's the whole list of nationalities (country names in alphabetical order):

Pilots were from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Malta, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela.

Cabin Crew were from Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Cuba, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Lithuania, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States.

While it's interesting to know the nationalities of those who participated in the study, nationality was less important for this research than where the crew members were based. Where a crew is based or 'domiciled,' usually indicates under which set of rules they operate when they're flying. For example, crews domiciled in the U.S. are subject to FAA rules, while crews domiciled in Europe have to comply with the rules of the Joint Aviation Authority of the European Community, and so on.

The various aviation rule-making authorities around the world vary somewhat on crew work rules and issues such as maximum duty time, required rest, age limits for licensing, etc. Thus, it was important to know where the survey respondents were based so that when comparisons of the groups were made, differences in rules could be accounted for.

Here's the breakdown of where the survey respondents were domiciled, by region, regardless of nationality: The largest groups were USA (about 67%); Europe (about 13%); and Canada (about 10%).

In the next few posts, I'll offer further details about the 'demographic characteristics' of the people who participated in the Aircrew Stress Study. Cabin Crew will be next, and then the Pilots. Stay tuned...

** Copyright © 2007 by Bobbie Sullivan. All rights reserved. **

Airlines are not the whole picture!

As soon as I launched the Aircrew Stress Study, I began to receive a lot of feedback about it from participants -- and I mean information well beyond the questions on the survey. People commented on the survey questionnaire and the topics it covered, but they also volunteered all kinds of things about their jobs and their lives that I hadn't asked about.

Some of this feedback came to me via the last page of the survey questionnaire itself, where I had put an open text box and invited participants to use it to say anything at all they wished. A lot more information came to me as email, or as comments on the forums where I had put invitations to participate in the survey.

I paid attention to all of it, and I was touched by how forthcoming and enthusiastic people were about my study. As a researcher, I felt I had struck gold!

When I designed the survey, it was aimed at people who flew for airlines. One of the first things I learned -- and very quickly -- was that 'flying for a living' is not necessarily synonymous with working for an airline.

I began to hear from people who worked in other sectors of aviation, many of whom pointed out that, while the survey was interesting, the job-specific parts didn't really address the kinds of flying they did. I heard from corporate crews, bush pilots, freight pilots, med-evac crews, air tour pilots, and flight school instructors, among others. They all suggested (or at least hinted) that I should re-design the survey -- or create a new one -- with specific questions to suit their kind of flying.

I came to realize that there were whole worlds of flying about which I knew next to nothing. So, I started my interviewing process all over again, in order to learn about flying outside of the airlines.

Repeating the process I used to develop the questionnaire for airline crews, I spoke to and corresponded with pilots and cabin crew who worked in many sectors of the civilian air transport industry besides the scheduled airlines. I asked a lot of questions on aviation message boards to fill in some of the blanks. I then tinkered with the original survey questionnaire a bit to include questions for the pilots who flew scheduled freight, and I designed a whole new questionnaire for the corporate crews and others who flew under General Aviation rules.

Along the way I began to get the feeling that this was not going to be a quick little research project. The more I learned, the more I realized I had a long way to go to understand what flying for a living was all about.

** Copyright © 2007 by Bobbie Sullivan. All rights reserved. **

Launching the Aircrew Stress Study

I'm so thoroughly 'Web 2.0' these days, that it amazes me to think that four or five years ago I actually considered distributing the survey for what would become the Aircrew Stress Study as a paper questionnaire, but I did -- briefly. A few considerations made me change my mind about that.

Most of those considerations can be summarized under the terms 'costs' and 'logistics.'

There were several kinds of costs to consider. First, of course, was the monetary cost. This study was, and is, an independent research project. As such it is self-funded -- no grant, no corporate sponsorship -- thus I had a limited budget.

Another cost to consider: labor. Using a paper questionnaire, as opposed to an electronic one, is a labor intensive undertaking. 'Responses' on questionnaires have to be converted to machine-readable 'data' so that they can be analyzed. So, the responses on a paper questionnaire have to be coded by hand -- a tedious process that is very time-consuming and also prone to error. Then the coded data have to be entered into a computer file in a form that analysis software can read. More labor. More possibilities for error.

Still another cost: time. All of those questionnaire coding and data entry tasks eat up valuable time that could be used for other tasks.

Then there were the logistical problems. I had relied on some family members and a few of their colleagues to distribute the 100 paper questionnaires that made up the field test. But how could I impose on them to distribute 500 -- maybe even 1000 -- questionnaires? I couldn't and wouldn't.

I had run earlier surveys elsewhere that were automated, but all of those were on stand-alone computers that were parked somewhere. Participants had to show up where the computers were in order to do the survey. The good part of that method was that the computer automatically collected the data, eliminating the need for hand-coding and data entry. The bad part, for the present case, was that there was no logical place (or handful of places) where I could set up such computers and hope to get the kind of sample I was hoping for.

Then I had one of those 'light bulb moments' like you see in cartoons. Why not go a step further and put the survey on line? I spent a few days sifting and searching around the Web for an appropriate solution, and I found it: SurveyMonkey.com. (Short unpaid plug here: I've used this service ever since, for multiple surveys, and I've been consistently happy with it.)

Fast forward to: The survey questionnaire is live on line. Now all I need are pilots and flight attendants who are willing to sit at their computers for 20 or 30 minutes and answer the questions.

Since the survey was on line, I decided to try to recruit participants on line as well. I set about searching for aviation-related websites and forums. Fortunately there are a gazillion of those to choose from! When I found a likely-looking site, I'd contact the owner, administrator, or forum moderator, tell them about the Aircrew Stress Study -- and about me -- and ask if I could post a notice with a link to the survey. In the end I contacted 30 different websites, and only one turned me down. (No, I'm not going to tell you which one.)

And then the responses started to come in. No, let me correct that: responses came pouring in. In all my years of survey research -- both commercial and academic -- I'd never seen anything like it. The participants' enthusiasm blew me away. Clearly, I had touched a nerve.

I began to receive heaps of emails from survey participants. Many actually thanked me for paying attention to the issues the survey addressed. Some volunteered to help recruit participants where they worked. So, I made up a one-page blurb about the survey that I could send to them to print and use as a handout or to post on a bulletin board.

Another thing that emerged from that flurry of emails was the first inkling that, although I had listened for a long time to the tales of my flying relatives, and although I had interviewed a number of pilots and cabin crew and had been bold enough to develop a questionnaire about 'aircrew stress,' I really didn't know squat about people who fly for a living!

Next: Some things I didn't know that I didn't know...

** Copyright © 2007 by Bobbie Sullivan. All rights reserved. **