Risk Assessment for Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography Applied in High Risk Environment

Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE) is a family of methods developed for investigation in social science based on subjective audio-video recordings with a miniature video-camera usually worn at eye-level (eye-tracking techniques are included). Despite its application to the analysis of high risk professions (e.g. anesthetists, aircraft pilots, nuclear reactor pilots) and the potential additional risks it induces, no suggestions regarding these concerns and no solutions helping researchers to anticipate this kind of risks are available in the literature. Aiming at filling this gap, we undertook a study of SEBE equipment applied to the analysis of workers’ activities on a nuclear power plant. The method was divided in three phases: i) observations and discussions on full scale simulators of activities undertaken by one or two workers (N=42) to characterize the consequences of the SEBE equipment, ii) bibliographic research combined with results of first phase to elaborate a risk assessment protocol, iii) analysis of its application in real operating situations (N=17). The elaborated protocol gave satisfactory results in terms of risk prevention and time application: No incident or accident occurred and the risk assessment took less than five minutes. The observations highlighted however a risk of side-effect (using SEBE equipment to justify subjects’ mistake or failure) giving greater importance to the necessity of this sort of risk assessment protocol. To date, the protocol needs to be tested in other industrial contexts in order to be improved and/or to confirm its robustness.