Where does awareness collide?

Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss coined this meaning in 1964 in Awareness Contexts and Social Interaction, and developed it in their 1965 book Awareness of Dying: an awareness context is the whole combination of what each person in a situation knows about the identity or fate of another, and what each knows the other to know. Their cases turned on dying patients, where staff and family might hold a prognosis the patient did not, producing closed, suspicion, pretense, or open patterns of interaction. The referent is a social arrangement of who knows what, reconstructed by observing an encounter, and it has nothing to do with a brand's foothold in memory or a pilot's grasp of a fast-changing scene.[1][2]

Unit

One arrangement of who knows what among the people in a situation

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified through field observation and interviews that reconstruct what each party knew and knew the other to know

David Aaker set out this meaning in 1991 in Managing Brand Equity, where brand awareness is the strength of a brand's presence in the mind of a buyer, running from bare recognition of the name up to its being recalled first in a category. Kevin Lane Keller's 1993 Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity made it one root of brand knowledge and split it into recognition and recall. The referent is a buyer's memory link to a name, gauged by surveys of prompted and unprompted recall, and it is distinct from who knows what in a social encounter or an operator's live picture of a situation.[3][4]

Unit

One buyer's memory strength for a brand name, from recognition to first mention

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Surveyed as aided recognition and unaided recall, and as the share of buyers who name the brand first in a category

Mica Endsley gave this meaning its theoretical form in 1995 in Toward a Theory of Situation Awareness in Dynamic Systems, though the phrase had long been used in military aviation before her paper: situation awareness is a person's perception of the elements in an environment, comprehension of what they mean, and projection of their status into the near future. It is what a pilot, air traffic controller, or driver holds in mind about a fast-changing scene so as to act in time. The referent is an operator's up-to-date model of a dynamic setting, probed at frozen moments, and it is unrelated to a brand's place in memory or a sociologist's map of who knows what.[5]

Unit

One operator's current grasp of a dynamic scene at a moment in time

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed with freeze-probe methods such as SAGAT, query techniques, and rating scales