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The Shape of Aviation Psychology: A Review of Articles

Published in the First 5 Years of The International
Journal of Aviation Psychology

Article  in  International Journal of Aviation Psychology · January 2000

DOI: 10.1207/S15327108IJAP1001_1

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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AVIATION PSYCHOLOGY, 10(1), 1–11
Copyright © 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

FORMAL PAPERS

The Shape of Aviation Psychology:

A Review of Articles Published in the
First 5 Years of The International
Journal of Aviation Psychology
David O’Hare and Ben Lawrence
Department of Psychology
University of Otago
Dunedin, New Zealand

The International Journal of Aviation Psychology became the first journal devoted
solely to aviation psychology with the appearance of its first issue in 1991. In the first
5 years (1991–1995 inclusive), 20 issues containing 104 articles have been published.
This study was designed to illuminate the nature of aviation psychology by an exami-
nation of the material published in its flagship journal. In addition to basic author and
institutional details, each article was coded in terms of topic, participants, method-
ological approach, and types of analysis undertaken. The results provide a picture of
the shape of aviation psychology in the first half of the 1990s and provide the basis for
tracking the development of aviation psychology in the ensuing years.

Psychologists have been involved in aviation since the beginning of World War I
when they were used by the Germans in aircrew selection (Koonce, 1984). Similar
developments took place shortly thereafter in the United States, France, Italy, and
the United Kingdom. The growth of modern aviation psychology as a subject con-
cerned with “optimizing the relationship between operators and their machines”
(Jensen, 1991, p. 1) is generally traced to the founding of the Psychology Branch of

Requests for reprints should be sent to David O’Hare, Psychology Department, University of Otago,
P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand. E-mail: ohare@psy.otago.ac.nz
2 O’HARE AND LAWRENCE

the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio on July 1, 1945 under
the directorship of Paul Fitts (Pew, 1994).
Fitts moved to the Laboratory of Aviation Psychology at The Ohio State Univer-
sity in 1949. Aviation psychologists have been prominent contributors to profes-
sional journals and societies ever since, but a forum for the exchange of information
between civil and military researchers and those involved in every aspect of the avia-
tion system did not exist until the establishment of the International Symposium on
Aviation Psychology by Richard Jensen in 1981. These symposia have been held bi-
ennially since then, with the 12th meeting due to take place in 2001. After the 5th
symposium in 1989, it was decided to launch a new journal specifically aimed at avi-
ation psychology. The first issue of The International Journal of Aviation Psychol-
ogy (IJAP) under the editorship of Richard Jensen was published in 1991.
In his introduction to the new journal (Jensen, 1991) several aims were set out.
These included the intention to publish a mix of formal and practitioner articles, to
achieve high standards of methodological rigor in the formal contributions, to rep-
resent the full spectrum of aviation psychology, and to encourage a strong interna-
tional focus. The Contributor Information statement in the first issue sets out the
expectation that “four divergent academic disciplines are expected to contribute
heavily to the contents of the journal … these fields are engineering and computer
science, psychology, education, and physiology.” As the journal enters its 10th
year of publication, it is timely to look back at the progress achieved thus far. To
what extent have these various aims been realized? What is the shape of the field of
aviation psychology as revealed by its flagship journal?
This study was undertaken with these questions in mind. A similar analysis of
the aviation medicine flagship journal Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medi-
cine (ASEM) was reported by Rudge (1995). The focus was primarily on the char-
acteristics of the authors of articles appearing in the journal over a 20-year period
(1975–1994). Among the findings were that 68% of articles originated in the
United States; the percentage of single author articles declined whereas the num-
ber with multiple authors increased; the average page length was 5.2; and the most
represented topic was clinical aerospace medicine, although an increase in num-
bers of articles in human factors was noted.
The aim of this study was to examine the characteristics of articles published in
the first 5 years of IJAP more closely. In addition to noting author and institution
characteristics and topic of study, a coding scheme was developed to provide de-
tailed information about the methodological and analytical approaches used in the
studies reported. The methodological coding scheme was also applied to small
samples (n = 25) of articles randomly selected from ASEM and from the leading
journal in the field of human factors and ergonomics—Human Factors. As well as
answering some of the questions noted earlier about the development of the IJAP
journal, this study provides a basis for subsequent examinations of trends and
changes in the field of aviation psychology.
 THE SHAPE OF AVIATION PSYCHOLOGY 3

METHOD

Every article published in the 20 issues covering the period of 1991 to 1995 inclu-
sive was analyzed. Book reviews and editorials were excluded. This yielded a total
of 104 articles.

Descriptive Information

The following author and institution information was recorded: article type (formal
vs. practitioner); country of first author; number of authors; name of first author’s
institution; type of institution (civil aviation, government, private company, mili-
tary, or university); type of department (psychology, engineering, physiology, edu-
cation, or other); page length; type of collaboration for articles with multiple au-
thorship (same department, same institution/different department, same
country/different institution, international); and topic of study.

Methodological Information

The number of studies reported in each article and the number of participants in
each study were recorded. The participant population was coded into one of the fol-
lowing four groups: operational personnel (including pilots, other flight crew, or air
traffic controllers); nonpilot; military; other (e.g., tapes, recordings). The method-
ological approach taken by each article was classified into one of the following
groups: literature review, case study, observational/correlational, or experimental.
Experimental studies were further classified into one of four study levels: full task
(actual flight or full task in high-end simulator), simplified task/high-end simula-
tor, simplified task/low-end simulator, or subtask (performance of a single task
with no flight-related context). Each analytical or statistical treatment (e.g., t test,
ANOVA, etc.) was recorded.
Small samples of articles (n = 25) were randomly drawn from the journals
ASEM and Human Factors published during the same period. Each article was
coded for the country of the first author; methodological approach (literature re-
view, case study, observational/correlational, experimental); and any analytical or
statistical treatment reported was noted.

Interrater Reliability

Each article was coded by Ben Lawrence. David O’Hare independently coded a
randomly selected sample of 26 articles. There was perfect agreement on the cod-
4 O’HARE AND LAWRENCE

ing for all but four variables. These were topic of study, type of institution, method-
ological approach, and level of study. For these four variables, the Cohen’s kappa
values were 0.92, 0.94, 0.83, and 0.74, respectively, and all were significantly
better than chance. The levels of interrater reliability also satisfied Bakeman and
Gottman’s (1987) recommendation that requires a kappa that is both statistically
significant and also greater than 0.7.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Descriptive Information

The 104 articles comprised 90 formal and 14 practitioner articles. In all but 12
cases, the first author was affiliated with an institution in the United States. Of these
12, 3 came from the United Kingdom, 2 each from New Zealand, Canada, and Ger-
many, and 1 each from Australia, Ireland, and Sweden. The dominance of U.S. in-
stitutions at 88% is considerably greater than the 68% reported for the journal
ASEM (Rudge, 1995) but very similar to that found in our sample from Human Fac-
tors (88.5%).
The breakdown of number of authors per article appears in Table 1. The propor-
tion of single-authored articles is much greater in IJAP (33%) than in ASEM during
the same period (18%). The proportion with five or more authors is very much
lower (5% vs. 19%). The institutional affiliation of the primary author of each arti-
cle was recorded, and those institutions with a count of two or more are shown in
Table 2.
The leading institution in terms of articles published in IJAP is clearly the Avia-
tion Research Laboratory (ARL) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-
paign. The ARL has been a leading contributor to research in aviation psychology
since its beginnings as the Aviation Psychology Laboratory in 1946 (Roscoe,
1980). The 19 institutions listed contributed 61.5% of the articles published in
IJAP during the survey period. Two institutions appear on the list of leading con-
tributors to both IJAP and ASEM: NASA-Ames Research Center and the
Wright-Patterson U.S. Air Force Base.
The institutions contributing to articles in IJAP were largely universities (47%).
The remainder came from the military (21%), private companies (15%), other
governmental organizations (12%), and civil aviation organizations (e.g., airlines;

TABLE 1
Breakdown of Number of Authors per Article

Number of Authors 1 2 3 4 5 6
Frequency 34 33 22 10 4 1
 THE SHAPE OF AVIATION PSYCHOLOGY 5

TABLE 2
Number of Publications by First Author’s Institutional affiliation

Number Institution

9 Aviation Research Laboratory, University of Illinois

8 Brooks Air Force Base Armstrong Laboratory
6 NASA-Ames Research Center, Moffett Field
4 Naval Training Systems Center, Orlando
3 Cranfield University, UK
3 Volpe National Transportation Systems Center
3 ILLIANA Aviation Sciences Ltd
3 Ohio State University, Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering
3 Texas Tech University, Department of Industrial Engineering
2 University of Otago (NZ), Department of Psychology
2 MIT, Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics
2 Catholic University of America, Cognitive Science Laboratory
2 Wright State University, Dayton, Department of Psychology
2 Essex Corporation, Orlando
2 USAF Academy, Colorado Springs
2 Wright Patterson Air Force Base
2 University of Minnesota, Human Factors Research Laboratory
2 University of Texas at Austin, Department of Psychology

5%). The articles from universities were almost equally split between psychology
departments (51%) and aviation/engineering departments (43%). No articles were
published from departments of physiology or education. The average page length
of published articles was 16.5 (range = 5–34), almost three times greater than arti-
cles published in ASEM (M = 5.3). However, the page format is different for the
two journals (single column for IJAP vs. double column for ASEM), so the articles
published in IJAP were approximately twice as long as articles appearing in ASEM
in terms of word length.

Authorship. Of the articles in IJAP, 33% were written by a single author; the
remaining 67% had multiple authorship. Of these, the majority (56%) involved col-
laboration within the same department, and only 3% involved collaboration with
another department within the same institution. A sizeable number of collabora-
tions were between institutions in the same country (36%), but only a handful (4%)
reflected collaboration across international boundaries.

Content. The main topic of each article was categorized as shown in Table 3.
The main topics of interest proved to be training, workload, and displays, which ac-
counted for 32% of the articles published in IJAP.
The currently popular subject of situation awareness was the topic of the same
number of articles (5) as the more traditional topic of visual perception. Somewhat
6 O’HARE AND LAWRENCE

surprisingly, topics such as stress, fatigue, and aging were each represented by
only a single contribution.

Methodological information. Of the 77 articles reporting an empirical

study, the large majority (81%) consisted of a single study, 15% consisted of two
studies, and 4% contained three studies. Figure 1 shows the numbers of participants
involved in both experimental and correlational studies.
The average number of participants in the experimental studies was 24.3 (range
= 2–90) compared to 377.8 (range = 4–3578) for correlational designs. The major-
ity of experimental studies reported in IJAP involved less than 30 participants,
which would suggest that statistical power is typically rather low in these designs.

Participant characteristics. In the majority of IJAP studies (71%), partici-

pants were operational personnel of some kind (e.g., pilots, air traffic controllers),
although 19% of studies used nonqualified participants. The remaining studies
were either based on a military participant pool (4%) or used inanimate participants
(e.g., tapes; 6%).

TABLE 3
Main Topic of Publications

Frequency Topic

11 Training
11 Workload
10 Displays
8 Selection
8 Simulator design
7 Automation
7 Cognitive processes
6 Crew resource management
5 Communication
5 Situation awareness
5 Visual perception
4 Accidents
3 Alcohol
3 Personality
2 Motion sickness
2 Decision making
2 Research policy
1 Stress
1 Aging
1 Expert systems
1 Fatigue
1 Risk management
 THE SHAPE OF AVIATION PSYCHOLOGY 7

FIGURE 1 Numbers of participants in experimental (A) and correlational (B) studies. One ep-
idemiological study with N = 11,548 has been excluded from this figure and descriptives in text.

Overall methodological approach. Of the reported studies, 39% were

classified as experimental, 35% were correlational/observational, 20% were litera-
ture reviews, and 6% were case studies. A comparison between IJAP and the two
other journals sampled is shown in Figure 2.
Human Factors is clearly the most heavily experimental of the three; IJAP pub-
lishes more case studies than either of the other journals. Both IJAP and Human
Factors publish a similar proportion of literature review-type articles, which are
not favored by ASEM. Human Factors publishes considerably fewer correlational
studies than ASEM, with IJAP somewhere in between. In terms of overall similar-
ity across these four categories, IJAP was more similar to Human Factors, r(4) =
.95, p < .055, than to ASEM, r(4) = .87, p > .1. Human Factors and ASEM were the
least similar, r(4) = .8, p > .2.

Study level. Most commonly (37%), the experimental studies reported in

IJAP involved participants in multiple tasks performed in a high-end simulator. In
these studies, the participants were not engaged in all the tasks involved in actual
flight. A sizeable proportion of studies (20%), however, did involve participants in
8 O’HARE AND LAWRENCE

FIGURE 2 A comparison between the methodological characteristics of articles published in

The International Journal of Aviation Psychology; Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medi-
cine; and Human Factors during the years sampled (1991 to 1995 inclusive).

either actual flight or in performing a full range of flight tasks in a high-end simula-
tor. A further 24% of the experimental studies involved participants in two or more
tasks performed on a low-end simulator (e.g., a PC-based simulation). The remain-
ing studies (20%) were based on the performance of a single task with no flight-re-
lated context.

Statistical analyses. The most favored statistical analysis was analysis of

variance (ANOVA), which was used in 36.5% of the articles. If analysis of
covariance (ANCOVA) and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) are in-
cluded, then this increases to 45%. The second most popular approach was to use a
simple parametric test (e.g., the student t test), which was the prime analysis re-
ported in 14% of articles. Simple correlation (11%) and multiple regression (11%)
were also widely used. The only other approach that was widely used (9%) was
nonparametric testing (e.g., chi-square, sign test).
Clearly, the statistical approaches commonly reported in IJAP articles are those
frequently used in other fields of human factors. The percentage of articles in Hu-
man Factors reporting either univariate or multivariate ANOVA was 54% com-
pared to 31% for ASEM. There was a strong preponderance of simple parametric
(38.5%) and simple nonparametric (27%) techniques in ASEM articles compared
to only 7.7% and 11.5%, respectively, for Human Factors.
It will be interesting to see if there is an increasing tendency to adopt
multivariate techniques such as multidimensional scaling (n = 2), principal com-
ponents analysis (n = 2), and log linear modeling (n = 1), which were only rarely
reported in this sample of IJAP articles.
 THE SHAPE OF AVIATION PSYCHOLOGY 9

GENERAL DISCUSSION

IJAP is now in its 10th year of publication. It remains the sole academic journal de-
voted to aviation psychology. In terms of the original aims (Jensen, 1991), the jour-
nal has certainly published a large number of both scientific and practitioner arti-
cles, although the largest contributing group consisted of university academics
from psychology departments. Given the demands on academics to “publish or per-
ish,” this is none too surprising. Whether the proportion of practitioner articles
(13%) and contributions from non university sources (53%) are regarded as ade-
quate can certainly be debated. In our opinion, both these figures seem more than
reasonable. However, there were no articles published from departments of physi-
ology or education, and only a very small number from the other disciplines that
aviation psychology was expected to draw on (Jensen, 1991).
Perhaps the most obvious area in which IJAP has not quite lived up to expecta-
tions is with respect to the word international. Despite the editor’s clearly stated in-
tentions (Jensen, 1991), an overwhelming proportion (88%) of published articles
have come from the United States. Noticeably few published articles are of Euro-
pean origin, which is somewhat surprising given the historical roots of aviation psy-
chology in Europe and current levels of activity—for example, there has been a
European Association of Aviation Psychologists active since 1956 (Koonce, 1984).
There are numerous hypotheses that could be advanced to explain the lack of
European contributions. For example, there may be a much smaller proportion of
academic aviation psychologists in Europe than in the United States, the method-
ological approach of European research may not match that of the U.S. human fac-
tors community, European researchers may prefer to publish in languages other
than English, and so forth.
Currently, only 3 of 38 members of the IJAP editorial board come from Europe.
This is, in fact, about the same proportion (8%) as the proportion of articles pub-
lished in IJAP that come from European contributors (7%).
Interestingly, the proportion of articles published in ASEM from European con-
tributors was more than twice as high at 14.5% (Rudge, 1995). This might suggest
that the underrepresentation of European contributors in IJAP may be more
closely related to methodological rather than language issues. This conclusion is
reinforced by data from the coding of the methodological and statistical ap-
proaches favored by Human Factors and ASEM. Perhaps the clearest difference is
in the high proportion of articles published in ASEM that contain only a very sim-
ple statistical analysis. Both IJAP and Human Factors show a preference for more
sophisticated statistical analyses, and this may be the explanation for the domi-
nance of both journals by U.S. researchers who have been predominantly schooled
in the ANOVA approach to science.
In other respects, IJAP might be adjudged to have struck a rather well-balanced
methodological profile with a more even spread across the four methodological
10 O’HARE AND LAWRENCE

categories than either ASEM or Human Factors. In all three journals, the publica-
tion of case studies was least favored with experimental studies most favored. The
disparity between the proportions in these groups was least for IJAP (6% to 39%)
and greatest for Human Factors (4% to 54%). Therefore, it could be argued that
IJAP is providing a broadly based methodological platform for research in avia-
tion psychology.
Also noteworthy was the high proportion of participants in studies reported in
IJAP who were operationally qualified. Much of the rest of psychology may draw
heavily on the behavior of white rats and undergraduate students, but these groups
have not been the basis of much of the research reported in IJAP. Using representa-
tive participants is an important step to ensuring the generalizability of results, but
this is not sufficient in itself. A number of other threats to generalizability must
also be dealt with (Chapanis, 1988).
Several authors noted (e.g., Johnston, McDonald, & Fuller, 1994; Koonce,
1984) that aviation psychology needs to broaden the scope of its efforts from the
traditional focus on cockpit crews and air traffic controllers to include other partic-
ipants in the aviation system. Koonce (1984) suggested that “ the entire airport ter-
minal: from passenger, baggage, and cargo processing to aircraft maintenance,
fuel handling, and systems support” (p. 507) warrants attention from aviation psy-
chologists. Our analysis shows that the topics most often reported in IJAP are
largely the traditional topics of aviation psychology—training, workload, and dis-
plays and that very little research outside these areas has been reported.
This study provided an empirically based snapshot of the shape of aviation psy-
chology in the first half of the 1990s as revealed through the pages of its flagship
journal. Such a study is necessarily based on the material published in IJAP, rather
than the material received for review. We have no way of knowing to what extent
the “gatekeepers” (i.e., reviewers and editors) have affected the characteristics of
the final mix of articles carried in the journal. Regardless of any such influence, the
results of this study should inform the debate about the present and future shape of
aviation psychology with empirical data concerning its public face.

REFERENCES

Bakeman, R., & Gottman, J. M. (1987). Observing interaction: An introduction to sequential analysis.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Chapanis, A. (1988). Some generalizations about generalization. Human Factors, 30, 253–267.
Jensen, R. (1991). Editorial. The International Journal of Aviation Psychology, 1, 1–3.
Johnston, N., McDonald, N., & Fuller, R. (Eds.). (1994). Aviation psychology in practice. Aldershot,
England: Avebury Technical.
Koonce, J. (1984). A brief history of aviation psychology. Human Factors, 26, 499–508.
 THE SHAPE OF AVIATION PSYCHOLOGY 11

Pew, R. W. (1994). Paul Morris Fitts, 1912–1965. In H. L. Taylor (Ed.), Division 21 members who made
distinguished contributions to engineering psychology? (pp. 23–44). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Roscoe, S. N. (1980). Aviation psychology. Ames: The Iowa State University Press.
Rudge, F. W. (1995). A review of articles published in Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine,
1975–94. Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, 66, 1005–1009.

Manuscript first received February 1998

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