Use of concurrent and retrospective verbal protocols to investigate workers’ thoughts during a manual-handling task

A manual handling task (an order picking task in a distribution warehouse) was investigated using concurrent verbal protocols and retrospective verbal protocols (applied at three different times after completion of the task). The study aimed to collect workers’ thoughts during the task and to determine what workers are comfortable with reporting. Video recordings of the task were used as a means of investigating the accuracy of the information which was reported. The concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol methods were compared and it was found that concurrent reports could be used to collect a range of task related thoughts, although they only contained a proportion of the workers’ thoughts during the task. Additional information could be obtained from retrospective reports, although these appeared to be vulnerable to bias and re-ordering of reported information. The retrospective reports produced whilst watching a video recording of the task were particularly vulnerable to bias from retrospective reasoning or the rationalisation of thoughts. Only one specific reference to posture or handling technique was made by any of the workers in their reports. There were also few references to load characteristics. Workers frequently reported aspects of the task that were easier to verbalise, such as the counting or labelling of items. It is not known whether the workers were only aware of these limited details of their tasks or whether they were only able to report limited details of the tasks because of factors affecting verbal reporting. This was an exploratory study which has collected valuable information from a small sample of experienced workers in relation to a common task from industry, but further study is needed to investigate the effects of factors such as load weight, load position and task duration on awareness and reporting of thoughts.