Techniques of subjective workload assessment: a comparison of SWAT and the NASA-Bipolar methods

Abstract

Abstract Assessment of subjective workload is becoming increasingly important in the evaluation of human-machine systems. Two popular methods were compared: (1) the Subjective Workload Assessment Technique (SWAT) that employed a conjoint measurement procedure to confer interval scale properties on the workload ratings, and (2) a technique under development at NASA that used an individually weighted workload score. Both methods were applied in a laboratory experiment that required the rating of a number of single- and dual-tracking and spatial transformation tasks. Both subjective assessment techniques displayed similar sensitivity to the different task manipulations. However, both techniques failed to detect the resource competition effects in the dual-task performance, and were in general insensitive to response execution processing demands. A notable difference between the two techniques was that the NASA-Bipolar ratings consistently had a smaller between-subject variability than the SWAT ratings. Discussion of the results is centred around the issue of the validity of assessment of subjective workload in general, and the construct and concurrent validity of the two techniques in particular.