Words about work performance and the company they keep

Abstract: In the study of safety and specifically in patient safety, there are many perspectives about the concept of “human error”. People have shared their concerns about the risks of using the term “human error” when referring to undesirable outcomes in work systems. Yet, this construct is still often used when communicating causation about undesirable work performance and accidents. Although, there has been a call for renewed or refreshed conceptualizations of work performance and safety (Safety II), it has only slowly taken hold. To facilitate awareness about these concepts, understanding the subtilties of language could help with how communication is shaped. Describing and fostering language awareness around safety II and resilience engineering may help facilitate dialogue and linguistic alignment around these concepts. To this end, we extract Medline abstracts that contain keywords “human error”, “resiliency”, “safety II”, and “resilience engineering.Natural language pipelines were created and explored using different techniques for viewing different levels of linguistic features. To accomplish this analysis, we extracted local features, contrastive features (Arnold, 2022), and co-occurrences. We also performed sentiment analysis on sentence extracts. Finally, a Naïve Bayes text classifier was trained for distinguishing between sentences that included the word “error” or “resiliency” and top linguistic features (words) that were strongly associated with each group were collected.2400 titles/abstracts were extracted that included the term “human error”, 4552 titles/abstracts were extracted that included the term “resiliency”, and 181 titles/abstracts were extracted in which the full text contained “safety II” or “resilience engineering”. Sentences that contained the word “error” also included the following words that were important to the text classifier “accidents”, “mistake”, and “wrong”. These words suggest the presence of a judgement statement. Whereas sentences that included the word “resiliency” were more likely to include words such as “family”, “community”, “coping”, and “mindfulness”. Preliminary findings suggest that sentences that contain the word “error” are much more likely to be classified as negative during sentiment analysis compared to sentences that contain “resiliency” which are more likely to suggest positive sentiment. Sentences from abstracts that contained the word “resiliency” were diverse in description and often in the context of explaining some characteristic of mental healthcare services. Although the use of resiliency in this context is not necessarily referring to that of “resilience engineering”, there is a possible opportunity for the safety science and human factors communities to learn from the language of healthcare. The use of the term “resiliency” and companion words when used to describe aspects of healthcare refer to patients’ capabilities and characteristics for adapting to changing conditions. Borrowing words and expressions, when sensible, from clinical domains for sharing perspectives on systems safety may resonate with healthcare professionals and help facilitate communication.In migrating to newer conceptual environments for studying safety, we will require newer linguistic expressions for communicating these concepts. Linguistic expressions that speak to people in a language they understand could help with this transition. Describing and discussing the words attached to concepts about safety could help fuel critical dialogue and ways of understanding our world.

Keywords: human factors, resilience engineering, work performance

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004846

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