Attitudes and accidents aboard an aircraft carrier

A 22-item questionnaire, developed to measure various behavioral attitudes reportedly associated with accidents, was given to 879 enlisted air wing support personnel and 156 aviators on an aircraft carrier at the start of deployment. A factor analysis of these 22 items indicated six underlying concepts for which scales were created. Personnel injuries for the air wing and aircraft accidents for the aviators were recorded for the duration of the cruise, and correlations of these criteria with the 22 items and six scales were computed. Three items significantly predicted accidents in both populations and all three appeared in the same factor. The Adventurous scale developed from this factor was significantly (p less than or equal to 0.01) correlated with accidents in both groups. This scale appears to measure attitudes toward risk taking, which was the only concept found useful for the prediction of future accidents in this study.