Development of the Contributing Factors Framework Interview Guide (CFF-IG): All aboard the rail safety truth train

The Contributing Factors Framework (CFF) tool has been used by Australian railway operators since 2009 in order to assist in the identification of socio-technical and human factor interactions which contribute to rail safety accidents. Whilst the use of the CFF has been demonstrated to be a valuable tool for post-accident safety report analysis, an examination of how the CFF could be used as an interview guide for rail safety investigations immediately post-accident has previously not been explored. This study was therefore interested in firstly examining if the current CFF tool could be developed into an investigators’ interview guide and secondly if the resulting Contributing Factors Framework - Interview Guide (CFF-IG) would assist rail safety investigators to elicit better information on the contributing factors to rail safety accidents. The CFF-IG was therefore developed to elicit information across the original CFF tool’s three key main headings of Individual and Team Actions, Technical Failures and Local Conditions & Organisational Factors and was then applied to 18 rail safety accidents. The use of the CFF-IG by rail safety accident investigators was examined to assess its usefulness in establishing a consistent line of questioning relating to the identification of railway socio-technical accident contributing factors. It was found that the CFF-IG could be effectively applied at post-accident interviews and assisted investigators to identify an in-depth range of contributing factors to accidents in complex rail socio-technical systems.