SOC 201 Chapter 6: Chapter 6.15
Document Summary
Ten years after the disaster, sociologist diane vaughan published her research on the space shuttle accident it took her a long time to do her research: When i started, it was from the point of view that it was misconduct. I kept looking for rule violations, but i didn"t find any. After about a year i had to throw everything out and start over. I relied on thousands of documents in the us national archives that were placed there by the government investigation. Many of these were engineering documents and memos. Doing the research involved learning engineering and nasa language. In the challenger case there is this notion of levels of acceptable risk, for example. Each part on the shuttle had to be classified at a criticality level, meaning the probability of failure. The reality was that every attempt they made to quantify and clarify risk gave them no help because there were thousands of technical components on the shuttle.
