Radio dispatchers' interruption recovery strategies

A field study was conducted at the British Transport Police Control Room in London. We used The Critical Decision Method (CDM) to explore radio dispatchers' cue identification, situation awareness and integration of information, particularly when following an interruption. The data from the CDM interviews was also analysed using the Emergent Themes Analysis (ETA) approach. The ETA resulted in categorizing difficulties that are shared by all radio dispatchers during high workload. Based on the ETA results, we conducted another set of CDM interviews which focus particularly in interruption recovery. The CDM gave us a clear idea of what information radio dispatchers need to recover from interruptions. We found that radio dispatchers are almost unaffected by interruptions and have developed two main interruption recovery strategies.