Never blame the umpire – a review of Situation Awareness models and methods for examining the performance of officials in sport

Abstract

As sport becomes more complex, there is potential for ergonomics concepts to help enhance the performance of sports officials. The concept of Situation Awareness (SA) appears pertinent given the requirement for officials to understand what is going on in order to make decisions. Although numerous models exist, none have been applied to examine officials, and only several recent examples have been applied to sport. This paper examines SA models and methods to identify if any have applicability to officials in sport (OiS). Evaluation of the models and methods identified potential applications of individual, team and systems models of SA. The paper further demonstrates that the Distributed Situation Awareness model is suitable for studying officials in fastball sports. It is concluded that the study of SA represents a key area of multidisciplinary research for both ergonomics and sports science in the context of OiS.

Practitioner Summary: Despite obvious synergies, applications of cognitive ergonomics concepts in sport are sparse. This is especially so for Officials in Sport (OiS). This article presents an evaluation of Situation Awareness models and methods, providing practitioners with guidance on which are the most suitable for OiS system design and evaluation.

Keywords:

• Situation Awareness
• sociotechnical systems
• cognitive ergonomics
• sport
• officials in sport
• umpire
• referee
• naturalistic research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A general citation search in Scopus of Situation* AND aware* AND sport identifies two articles which discuss SA in relation to sport. James and Patrick (2004) identified the lack of application of SA to sport up to their time of writing, and also and also provide a survey of SA-like studies related sport prior to 2004.

2. Refreshingly, the 1st International Conference on Science and Practice of Sport Refereeing occurred in Clermont-Ferrand in 2014; moving OiS research into previously unchartered waters.

3. While Bourbousson et al. (2011, 2012) discuss the role of shared knowledge and mutual awareness in relation to SA, it is important to note that the Course of Action (Theureau 2003) method used in the studies is epistemologically different to that of SA.