465 5A Operationalizing Constructs

Constructs 1

Operationalising Constructs

Airline safety ratings are the most complex statistics to formulate because no single rating can be said to be the accepted , universal rating . This frustration was evident in a Wall Street Journal article of Jan 24 , 1986 where the federal government pointed out a major obstacle facing its proposal to rank airline safety . The contentious issue was that a single airline can rank safest and most dangerous all in the space of one year . The reason for this is not easy to overcome and the solution may

lie with airlines accepting universal standards

Ratings for airline safety have different formulas . For example , in 1993 , the International Airline Passengers Association (IAPA formulated rates based on two factors , fatal accidents per million flights performed , and passengers killed per million passengers carried (Barnett , n .d . These ratings were based on a ten year period . Assuming that the airline with the highest rating during that decade suffered a single fatality one year after the survey , its rating would then plummet to the bottom the following year . Therefore this type of airline safety rating cannot be a convincing scale to inform travelers . One fatality is hardly enough to condemn an airline which has been safe for ten years

According to an article in Telus (2000 , other factors can be used to rate airline safety . These include maintenance and operational procedures , types of training programs , age of fleet and specific routes flown . Furthermore , accidents can be caused by circumstances beyond the control...