Evaluating a Macrocognition Model of Team Collaboration using Real-world Data from the Haiti Relief Effort

Abstract

On January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake ravished Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince. Throughout the relief effort the communications that transpired between responders were recorded in the All Partners Access Network (APAN) collaboration system. A lexical link analysis (LLA) provided a systematic way to select a subset of the large amount of data for analysis by selecting several themes to analyze from initiation to completion. We analyzed the collaborative information exchanges for the Haiti humanitarian assistance/ disaster relief effort by applying definitions of the macrocognitive processes included in a model of team collaboration. The goal for the research reported here is to understand the role of cognition in teams who are collaborating to solve unique, challenging, information-rich problems. Results indicate the task environment will influence which macrocognitive processes are used and evidence was found for several additional macrocognitive processes.