Review article: A scoping review of human factors in avalanche decision-making&nbsp;

Hetland, Audun; Hetland, Rebecca Anne; Skille, Tarjei Tveito; Mannberg, Andrea

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628

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https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628

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26 Aug 2024

| 26 Aug 2024

Review article: A scoping review of human factors in avalanche decision-making

Audun Hetland, Rebecca Anne Hetland, Tarjei Tveito Skille, and Andrea Mannberg

Abstract. The interest in understanding the human aspects of avalanche risk mitigation has steadily grown over the past few decades. Between 2001–2011, 11 research papers on decision-making in avalanche terrain were published in peer-reviewed journals. Between 2012–2022, this number rose to 55. These papers have been authored by researchers from various disciplines and publications in journals across different fields. Despite the field’s nascent stage, to guide future research it is pertinent to provide an overview of the insights from existing research literature.

This paper offers a systematic overview of peer-reviewed research on human factors in avalanche decision-making. The overview is based on a systematic literature search covering research published up until the end of 2022. The search was conducted across six databases, including Scopus and Web of Science, using a set of keywords related to avalanche decision-making (e.g., “decision-making,” “backcountry skiing,” “avalanche terrain,” “avalanche accident”). Out of nearly 13,000 articles containing at least one of the key search terms, 70 had a research question related to avalanche decision-making and were published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Additionally, 100 relevant papers were published as ISSW (International Snow Science Workshop) proceedings.

We coded all identified papers based on major and minor research questions, control variables, population covered, and methodology. 12 concepts described the different research themes (e.g., avalanche accidents, avalanche education, decision-making strategies). We applied the concepts to the 70 peer-reviewed papers and present them by their main concept.

Received: 08 Jun 2024 – Discussion started: 26 Aug 2024

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Audun Hetland, Rebecca Anne Hetland, Tarjei Tveito Skille, and Andrea Mannberg

Status: final response (author comments only)

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-1628', Benjamin Zweifel, 05 Sep 2024

Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper. The authors provide a very valuable overview of the existing scientific literature and its content on the topic of human factors in avalanche decision making. I fully agree with the authors that although much research has been done on this topic in the last decade, it still has a lot of potential.
The present study is very carefully scientifically structured and excellently written in this paper. I congratulate the authors! Even after studying this paper in detail, I have not discovered any serious shortcomings and therefore recommend the editor to publish this paper.
I have the following minor comments:
There is confusion on the number of papers in the results: in the abstract, on page 5 and page 9 (line 285) you mention 70 papers, in Fig. 1 you state 69 papers and in the Table 2 I counted 69 papers?
Page1, line 40: I was a bit confused by the term ‘qualitative systematic scoping review’ since you later distinguish scoping review vs. systematic review (paragraph 2.1). Accordingly, I suggest skipping ‘systematic’ here.
Page3, line 105-106: It makes totally sense to me to not set a lower limit for publication year. One argument could also be, that this topic had been under research only in recent times anyway.
Page 5, Table 1: I’m not familiar with the term ‘off-bounds’. I know ‘off-piste’ or ‘out of bounds’…?
Page 9, paragraph 3.1.1: I was very surprised to not find Ian McCammon in this paragraph, since he really was the pioneer within the heuristic traps field. I guess, this is, because he didn’t publish his findings in peer-reviewed journals? Probably this can be discussed (discussion or limitation section)?
Page 14, Table 5: I suggest using exactly the same wording for the tags (Tag 1 to Tag 3) as used in Table 3. Then it seems that there is some formatting issues: I assume that there are different text sizes in this table and there is an unpleasant table break form page 16 to page 17

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Audun Hetland, 05 Sep 2024
  
  Dear dr.Zweifel.
  Thank you very much for taking the time to review our paper and also for the detailed comments where you point out lack of clarity or mishaps that we our selves were unable to pick up in the final stage of writing up the paper.
  We will address them in turn:
  
  69 or 70 papers: Thank you very much for pointing out this. In the final stage of writing up the paper we went back and checked the final analysis one last time. We then discovered that one of the papers had been falsely discarded and therefore included this in the papers, which increased the number of papers from 69 to 70. We have apparently not been able to implement this change through out the paper and we will correct this in the text and table.
  Page 1, line 40: Qualitative systematic scoping review: Thank you for pointing out the lack of coherence in our terminology. We will go through the paper and make sure that we use the same terminology throwout the paper.
  Page 3, line 105-106. Thank you. Yes we where curious to see what had been written about human factor back in time and therefore searched without any lower limit on publication year. However, when reviewing the results we found that all papers that matched our criterias where of newer date. So even though we did not have any lower limit we did not find any substantial contributions dating back more than two decades.
  Page 5, Table 1: Thank you for pointing this out. This is mean to be out-of-bounds and we will correct this in the table.
  Page 9, paragaph 3.1.1. Yes, we fully agree with you that McCammon should be given a attention and credit as his ISSW proceedings are hallmark papers in the human factor research. We initially aimed to include conference proceedings in our search. Indeed we have conducted the same search in the Montana library where the ISSW proceedings are stored - as well as other databases where conference proceedings are listed. We found 80 relevant proceeding papers solely originating from the ISSW conference. Many of these are important studies for the avalanche community and we therefore conducted the same data extraction and listing of these papers which we provide at https://osf.io/u9ydm/
  
  It became apparent however, that in order to keep to the PRISMA guidelines for scoping reviews we needed to apply stricter rules that were not applicable to the proceeding papers. We therefore ended up only including peer-reviewed studies in this paper. As you correctly point out this is the sole reason why McCammons papers are not listed in the results. We will include his major contribution to the field in the introduction, and also clarify this in the limitation and discussion section. We hope the interested reader find our extraction and listing of the proceedings helpful even though we could not include them in the paper at the end.
  Page 14. Table 5. Thank you. Yes we will go back and redo the tables to correct for the formatting issues that is apparent in the pre-print and use the same description to increase clarity.
  
  Again, thank you very much for the effort in reviewing the paper. Much appreciated.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-1628', Anonymous Referee #2, 12 Sep 2024

General comments
I greatly appreciate the opportunity to review this wonderful paper. The authors have embarked upon an ambitious and pioneering review that establishes an important resource for follow-on work. Table 5 in particular will be invaluable for future researchers in this field. Overall, the work is well conceived, well executed and very readable. I concur with the previous reviewer that this paper is worthy of publication with some very minor revisions.
Specific comments
First, I agree with the excellent points raised by the previous reviewer. In particular, I appreciate the author’s willingness to address the use of the term “systematic”: I too found the term confusing with regard to the intent of the research effort. Simple wording changes would fix this issue.
Page 1, lines 35-6: As I am sure the authors are aware, the term “human factors” as used in the avalanche community differs appreciably from its meaning in the broader scientific and engineering literature. A sentence here about this usage discrepancy will avoid confusing readers from other fields.
Page 2, lines 57, 61-2: The authors define one of the functions of a scoping review as identifying knowledge gaps. They also state that one of their goals was to reveal “uncharted research areas” within the field. Section 4 could be improved with a more explicit discussion of these gaps and unexplored research areas. This brief addition would be a valuable take-away for many readers.
Page 3, Section 2.2.1: I found the treatment of ISSW papers confusing. The link leads to a coding of 81 papers, suggesting by their sheer number that these are important for a comprehensive scoping review. These papers are mentioned several times in the text despite being excluded from the thematic analysis and results. I see that the PRISMA-ScR criteria encourages the inclusion of “gray literature” in the interest of creating a comprehensive review (checklist tip sheet Item 7). I think a more detailed rationale for exclusion of ISSW papers and a more explicit discussion in the Discussion and Limitations sections would help readers understand the actual scope of this study, since most will be familiar with the ISSW and will wonder why it was not included as a source.
Section 3, Results: The authors’ framing of each theme in the broader literature followed by their specific results is wonderful and will be exceedingly useful for future researchers. Very nicely done.
Section 5, lines 532-3. The authors indicate that their study is a starting point for future work, and it certainly is. But a bit more detail would be helpful describing the specific future work the authors feel would be worthwhile (PRISMA-ScR checklist item 21). Of special interest would be what systematic reviews would be valuable and what specific aspects of “avalanche education quality” could be examined by future studies. The results of Section 3 provide a ready-made template for such a discussion, which I think would be valuable for many readers.
Technical corrections
Page 1, line 19: The abstract states 100 ISSW papers; the ISSW coding file contains 81. I think it would help readers to know up front that these papers were excluded from the paper’s results.
Page 1, line 22: Begin sentence with Twelve not 12.
Page 2, line 61: reveal is misspelled.
Page 12, line 398: trend(s)
Page 12, line 423: decision-making aid(s)
Page 13, line 446: …studies include…

Overall, this was a very enjoyable paper and it will be a worthwhile contribution to the field. Congratulations to the authors on their hard work and scientific vision. Thank you again for the opportunity to play a role in the publication of this excellent work.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-RC2
- AC2:
  'Reply on RC2', Audun Hetland, 18 Oct 2024
  General comments
  I greatly appreciate the opportunity to review this wonderful paper. The authors have embarked upon an ambitious and pioneering review that establishes an important resource for follow-on work. Table 5 in particular will be invaluable for future researchers in this field. Overall, the work is well conceived, well executed and very readable. I concur with the previous reviewer that this paper is worthy of publication with some very minor revisions.
  
  Answer: Dear reviewer, thank you for using both time and effort to review our manuscript. We are pleased to read that you found that the paper makes an important contribution, and we highly appreciate your insightful and constructive comments. On our side we have been busy with organizing the ISSW in Tromsø, and apologize for our rather late response. Below, we describe how we will try to accommodate your suggestions and concerns.
  Specific comments
  
  First, I agree with the excellent points raised by the previous reviewer. In particular, I appreciate the author’s willingness to address the use of the term “systematic”: I too found the term confusing with regard to the intent of the research effort. Simple wording changes would fix this issue.
  
  Answer: We agree with you and the other reviewer that the description “Qualitative systematic scooping review” is confusing. A scoping review is a systematic review, so the term qualitative is confusing. We will delete “qualitative” so that the description is a systematic scoping review”. We could further delete the systematic, given that this is inherent in a scoping review – but we do not expect the majority of readers to be familiar with scoping reviews and therefore suggest to keep the description of it as systematic. We are open to suggestions or other clarifications you see fit. We will also go through the paper and make sure that we use the same terminology throughout the paper.
  
  Page 1, lines 35-6: As I am sure the authors are aware, the term “human factors” as used in the avalanche community differs appreciably from its meaning in the broader scientific and engineering literature. A sentence here about this usage discrepancy will avoid confusing readers from other fields.
  
  Answer: We agree that the term ‘human factors’ should be defined. In addition to the term having different meanings in different fields, we suspect that there may be some spread in the understanding of the term even within the field of snow and avalanche science. We will both include a sentence about that the term is used differently in different fields, and our definition of the term in the paper.
  Page 2, lines 57, 61-2: The authors define one of the functions of a scoping review as identifying knowledge gaps. They also state that one of their goals was to reveal “uncharted research areas” within the field. Section 4 could be improved with a more explicit discussion of these gaps and unexplored research areas. This brief addition would be a valuable take-away for many readers.
  
  Answer: We completely agree that identifying gaps in the literature is important, and that our paper lacks a thorough analysis of such gaps. However, to fully understand the gaps in the literature, one would need to do a thorough analysis of both the content and methodologies used in all papers compared to what exists in other related fields. This is a natural next step, but we argue that it deserves paper(s) on its own. As part of our greater literature project, we will dive into the content of the categories we identify in the current paper. As we see it, the most fruitfull approach would be a narrative review of the different streams show casing how the different research streams have developed over time, what their focus is and has been – and also pointing out gaps in terms of topics that has not yet received attention. To accommodate your comment, and initiate a discussion of gaps in the literature, we will include a discussion on the number of papers addressing the different themes identified in the scoping review and possibly an overarching discussion of obvious gaps. We hope that this is sufficient to address your concern.
  Page 3, Section 2.2.1: I found the treatment of ISSW papers confusing. The link leads to a coding of 81 papers, suggesting by their sheer number that these are important for a comprehensive scoping review. These papers are mentioned several times in the text despite being excluded from the thematic analysis and results. I see that the PRISMA-ScR criteria encourages the inclusion of “gray literature” in the interest of creating a comprehensive review (checklist tip sheet Item 7). I think a more detailed rationale for exclusion of ISSW papers and a more explicit discussion in the Discussion and Limitations sections would help readers understand the actual scope of this study, since most will be familiar with the ISSW and will wonder why it was not included as a source.
  
  Answer: We completely agree that the ISSW papers are important, and that they should ideally be included in the review. The reason for why we chose not to do so is that there is a very large spread in quality, and it is difficult to create stringent eligibility criteria (we chose to exclude PhD and MSc theses that have not been published peer-review for the same reason). However, given their importance in the field we still choose to search through the relevant databases, sort and extract data from the ISSW proceedings the same way we did with the peer-reviewed papers.
  
  The ISSW proceedings that are available in the online supplemental material constitute the final result of this effort based on the following criteria. We only included ISSW proceedings that 1) contained a clear research question or objective, 2) presented a description of the method used to answer the research question or reach the objective, and 3) built on previous research (i.e., included at least one reference to peer-reviewed research).
  However, even with these criteria, the quality spans from very high, to very low. To include these papers in the review, we would have to develop an even more detailed set of criteria. This would require both a much more thorough review of the papers than done for the peer-review literature and defining a systematic set of evaluation criteria. While this is possible, it would both requiring use to increase the length of the current paper and take a substantial amount of time. We would ideally want to do this, but for now, we propose doing a review of the ISSW literature in a potential separate paper.
  To add transparency in the paper, we will add a section where we motivate why the ISSW proceedings were left out, and the criteria used for including a sub-set of ISSW papers in the online materials.
  Section 3, Results: The authors’ framing of each theme in the broader literature followed by their specific results is wonderful and will be exceedingly useful for future researchers. Very nicely done.
  
  Answer: Thank you for this very encouraging comment!
  Section 5, lines 532-3. The authors indicate that their study is a starting point for future work, and it certainly is. But a bit more detail would be helpful describing the specific future work the authors feel would be worthwhile (PRISMA-ScR checklist item 21). Of special interest would be what systematic reviews would be valuable and what specific aspects of “avalanche education quality” could be examined by future studies. The results of Section 3 provide a ready-made template for such a discussion, which I think would be valuable for many readers.
  
  Answer: Thank you for this enlightening comment. We completely agree that this is lacking in the paper and that it should be included. We will add a section in the discussion where we elaborate on the future work needed, both in terms of a more detailed content analysis of the existing research, and in terms of research on specific topics within the field of “human factors in avalanche terrain”.
  Technical corrections
  Page 1, line 19: The abstract states 100 ISSW papers; the ISSW coding file contains 81. I think it would help readers to know up front that these papers were excluded from the paper’s results.
  
  Answer: Thank you for noticing this error of ours. This is explained by the criteria used for selecting the ISSW papers (described in the answer to comment 4). We will clarify by adding an explanation on the selection criteria.
  Page 1, line 22: Begin sentence with Twelve not 12.
  
  Answer: Thank you for noticing our sloppy use of numbers. We will change to “Twelve”
  Page 2, line 61: reveal is misspelled.
  
  Answer: thank you for making us aware of this typo.
  Page 12, line 398: trend(s)
  
  Answer: Thank you for noticing this. We will change from “trend” to “trend(s)”
  Page 12, line 423: decision-making aid(s)
  
  Answer: Thank you. We will change to “decision-making aid(s)”
  Page 13, line 446: …studies include…
  
  Answer: Another sloppy mistake of ours. Thank you. We will change from “includes” to “include”.
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-AC2
CC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2024-1628', Bernhard Streicher, 27 Sep 2024

Just on a short note:
I highly value this study for getting an overlook on the current research state of the topic 'humans & avalanche'.
However, I would like to recommend the author to add the methods / methodological approch of each reported study/publication as well (e.g. adding rows in Table 5). Methods of studies differe widely and are an important information.
Best regards,
Bernhard Streicher
P.S.: since I was interest in differences in methods, i read all 70 abstracts ...

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-CC1
- AC3:
  'Reply on CC1', Audun Hetland, 18 Oct 2024
  Just on a short note:
  I highly value this study for getting an overlook on the current research state of the topic 'humans & avalanche'.
  However, I would like to recommend the author to add the methods / methodological approch of each reported study/publication as well (e.g. adding rows in Table 5). Methods of studies differe widely and are an important information.
  
  Answer: Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on our paper. We really appreciate your input and agree that the methodology employed in the papers is important information. The matrix containing the review data (ScopeReviewMatrix_2023.xlsx), which is available for download at OSF | ScopeReviewMatrix_2023.xlsx, contains information about the method used in all the reviewed papers. We include information on several method categories: sampling procedure (e.g., randomized or convenience sampling, online or in the field), general data collection method (e.g., survey, field observation, theoretical modeling), specific data collection method (e.g., recall, experiment, GPS tracks), and type of data (e.g., qualitative, quantitative).
  While we completely agree that this information is interesting and important, it would be challenging to include it in the current paper. Given that the focus of our paper is on the topics (or themes) covered in the literature to date, regardless of methodology we think that including methodology in the discussion would make the focus of the paper less clear.
  But a review of different methods should definitely be done, and this is something that we could foresee us coming back to in another paper. One approach could then be an overall thematic analysis of the methodology categories, and a per theme analysis. We find that a logic next step in our literature project is to dig deeper into each of the identified themes to analyze both the content in more detail, and what we can learn from the studies. This includes an analysis of the methods used, as this affects both the generalizability and the interpretation of causality.
  Since the supplemental material includes information about methodology, we will clarify in the paper that this can be found and downloaded at osf. We will highlight that this information is available in the supplemental materials in the paper and include a link to the excel document. Thanks again for a very good suggestion and reading our paper!
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-AC3
AC4: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-1628', Audun Hetland, 09 Nov 2024

Dear editor.
We have now revised and improved the paper based on the reviewers exelent comments and suggestions. Compared to the ISSW proceeding paper the current manuscript we believe the current manuscript is now significantly different. The latest version is more than three times as long as the ISSSW proceeding and even though the table with the results remain the same, all other sections are significantly improved. We hope this address the concern of the similarity between the ISSW paper and the current manuscript.

Again, we are very grateful for the constructive and helpful review.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-AC4

Audun Hetland, Rebecca Anne Hetland, Tarjei Tveito Skille, and Andrea Mannberg

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Short summary

Research on human factor in avalanche decision making has become increasingly popular the past two decades. The studies span across a wide range of disciplines and is published in a variety of journals. To provide an overview of the literature this study provide a systematic scooping review of human factor in avalanche decision making. 70 papers fulfilled the search criteria. We extracted data and sorted the papers according to their main theme.


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