Extracting cultural relationships from helicopter accidents

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2014 in the subject Sociology - Culture, Technology, Peoples / Nations, , language: English, abstract: This paper explores the role of culture and its relationships in helicopter accidents based on the cultural differences between two different countries. Helicopter operations in Nigeria and the UK share many common features including a prominent offshore oil industry that places heavy demands on helicopter transport, but they differ in terms of the cultural context within which these operations take place. Nigeria shows themes associated with high cultural context. The UK, themes were predominately associated with low cultural context. Air accident investigation reports were subjected to an in-depth theme-based content analysis in order to distil the role of culture in their causation. This analysis was selected as the means by which to extract cultural factors from the reports and variables influencing human error leading to accidents. Text and cluster analysis was used as an exploratory tool to observe patterns by grouping the nodes that shared similar themes. The study shows two key findings. First, the sampled UK and Nigerian accident reports differ in respect to weak and strong uncertainty avoidance. Secondly, and more importantly, cultural factors, although not currently well represented in accident analysis were prominent in the sampled accident reports.