ABSTRACT
REQUEST (the Railway Ergonomics Questionnaire) has now been used on five separate occasions since 1998 to collect attitudes and opinions on a range of human factors issues from signallers (and other associated groups of workers) in the railway industry in the United Kingdom. In the first four of these surveys, between 1998 and early in 2004, the survey was conducted with modest samples of respondents, sampling from around 500-600 respondents at a range of signalling and control centres, achieving response rates of between 25% and 50%. The questionnaire has been developed in successive surveys, building a comprehensive tool which was designed to complement other tools which could be used as an audit of human factors issues in the workplace. By early 2004 the questionnaire contained over 300 questions, largely ratings on 10 scales broken down into 27 subscales. In addition there were qualitative questions on problems with the work environment, comments on shiftwork, opinions on the best and worst aspects of the job and opinions on the how the organisation achieved the balance between capacity, performance and safety. However, its strength as a comprehensive tool was perhaps also a weakness as, in its entirety, the questionnaire was now quite lengthy, with a mean completion time of 51 minutes. The length of the questionnaire, in addition to factors such as the lack of opportunity to complete the questionnaire at work and a declining confidence in surveys generally, were felt to have contributed to rather disappointing response rates in its earlier administrations.
