CHAPTER 4. EXPERIMENT
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ATIS will provide a broad range of support to drivers. Most concepts of ATIS for private vehicles include navigation aids, safety systems, traveler's aid services, and communications. CVO also includes administration, tracking, and management functions. Regardless of the exact functional composition of ATIS, there are overriding concerns about whether such a system will be accepted and purchased by drivers of private vehicles and whether commercial drivers will accept or reject systems installed by fleet owners. As documented in our earlier literature review (Kantowitz, Becker, & Barlow, 1993), user acceptance of new technology is a complex, multi-faceted problem but one which may be tractable to experimental analysis. In the study reported here, our goal has been to examine a variety of methodologies and analytic techniques that may prove useful in assessing user acceptance of ATIS/CVO functions.
The current study addressed CVO function acceptance issues, independent of implementation. Both local and long-haul commercial drivers served as participants in the study. In this study, only paper and pencil questionnaires were used, coupled with verbal explanations and examples of function application. The current study also used a direct magnitude estimation task, a psychophysical forced-choice analysis, and a relatively new link-weighted network analysis (Schvaneveldt, 1990).
Throughout the study, the participants were asked to assess the ATIS functions for their job-related value. The variations between this study and the prior studies increase the range of methodological alternatives considered under this task.
The link-weighted network analysis is an attempt to apply the emerging technology of knowledge engineering to the task of understanding user acceptance issues. The network analysis can yield detailed structures for the concepts under investigation leading to greater specificity in data interpretation, alternative hypotheses, and perhaps even conclusions. The Pathfinder algorithm (Schvaneveldt, 1990) for network analysis has been chosen for use in this study for two reasons. First, it is well founded in mathematical graph theory providing a form of representation that is shared with many system engineering disciplines. Second, Pathfinder was developed for the purpose of more explicitly representing the structures of human memory and the contents of mental models. As such, Pathfinder is also well founded in psychological measurement. Earlier studies using this analysis have identified differences in the networks produced by Air Force instructor pilots, by pilot trainees, and by current fighter pilots (Schvaneveldt et al., 1985), as well as network differences between users of a documentation preparation system and the model used to define the system (Kellog & Breen, 1991). In using Pathfinder, we will attempt to identify how local and long-haul drivers evaluate ATIS functions as job performance aids and whether there are differences between the types of drivers.