Overall Activity 



The average percentage of total mission time spent on various activity 

 categories by all aquanauts is shown in Figure 2. As the figure indicates, 

 aquanauts spent a significant proportion of their time in productive endeavors. 

 For all aquanauts, the average amount of time spent working was 8.04 hours per 

 day. Scientist-aquanauts averaged 7.15 hours per day working on marine science. 

 These mean times over several weeks represent far more undersea work than could 

 have been achieved through operations from the surface. It is also obvious 

 that the aquanauts were primarily work-oriented during their sojourn on the 

 bottom. Work and sleep combined accounted for the bulk of a day's activity, 

 with leisure activity the bull session, typically during and after meals. 

 Little time was spent on organized activities such as games, and only occa- 

 sional use was made of television tapes. Background music was widely used but 

 typically in conjunction with other activity. 



There were large differences between teams on the variables composing the graph 

 shown here. Table 4 shows the percentage of mission time spent on each activ- 

 ity for each team of aquanauts. Components of composite criteria (work, leisure, 

 and total marine science) are shown separately. The significant levels of the 

 overall differences across teams were computed by analysis of variance and are 

 shown in the table. 



The range between the lowest and highest teams on many of the activity vari- 

 ables is striking. For example, scientists on the highest team spent 39.47o of 

 their time in marine science work (average 9.4 hours per day) while those on 

 the lowest averaged 21.1% (average 5.1 hours per day). This represents an aver- 

 age difference of 4.3 hours per day. The team scoring highest on sleep spent 

 39.6% of its time sleeping (average 9.5 hours per day) in contrast with the 

 lowest which spent only 30. 8% (average 7.4 hours per day). This represents an 

 average difference of 2.18 hours per day. Factors leading to team differences 

 and the interrelations of activity variables will be discussed later. It should 

 be noted that these figures represent actual time spent in the activities meas- 

 ured. An individual might spend 8 hours a day in an office but spend 30 minutes 

 drinking coffee, 30 minutes in social conversation, 15 minutes relaxing, an hour 

 eating, and the rest of the time working. In our system, he would be credited 

 with 5.75 hours of work. 



Additional Comparisons of Missions 



The large differences found between individual missions raise questions as to 

 whether these variations in behavior are a function of factors within indi- 

 viduals and social groups or whether they result from external factors such as 

 mission duration. To evaluate these questions, analyses were performed to 

 determine whether there were systematic differences between types of missions. 

 These tested the proposition that differences between teams were a function of 

 mission length. In these comparisons, results from the six 20-day missions were 

 combined and contrasted with results from the four 2-week missions by unweighted 

 means analysis of variance. The results are shown in Table 5. 



As can be seen in Table 5, there were significant differences between long and 

 short missions on several activity variables. These differences appear to be 

 readily explainable as a function of circumstances related to mission duration 



VIII-31 



