Overview

NSCAT (the Nuclear Safety Culture Assessment Tool) is where safety culture assessments are planned, carried out, and reported. This manual is for the people who do that work — building and distributing surveys, running interviews and focus groups, recording what you find, and reading the reports that come out of it.

If you are here to set NSCAT up — create accounts, define the framework, manage the question pool — you want the NSCAT Admin Manual instead.

How an assessment fits together

An activity is the container for one assessment. Everything you do lives inside one:

Inside an activity	What it is for
Survey	One survey per activity, distributed by link or on paper, collecting rated answers and comments.
Interviews	One-to-one conversations, recorded as notes against interview questions.
Focus Groups	Group discussions, recorded the same way as interviews.
Observations	What you noticed — the raw findings of the assessment.
Recommendations	What should be done about it.
Lessons Learned	What others should take away, shared beyond this activity.
Reports	The analysis — by question, by theme, by demographic, and survey against interview.

GOOD TO KNOW An activity holds one survey but many interviews and focus groups. If you need a second survey, that means a second activity.

Your role on an activity

What you can do is decided per activity, not by your account alone. There are two ways you may be on one:

Role	What it gives you
Team Lead	Write access to everything in the activity — survey, interviews, focus groups, observations, recommendations, lessons learned. Also lets you manage the activity's Team Members.
Team Member	Read and/or write access per area, set individually for you. You might have write access to Interviews and read-only access to Reports, for example.

HEADS UP If an activity's menu shows Access Restricted, you are not assigned to that activity at all. Ask a Team Lead or your administrator to add you — it is not something you can grant yourself.

GOOD TO KNOW Where you have read access but not write, pages open normally but the fields are read-only and the save buttons are disabled. That is your permission, not a fault.

The permission areas

A Team Member's access is set separately for each of these:

Interviews, Focus Groups, Survey Response, Observations, Recommendations, Lessons Learned, and Reports (read-only — there is nothing to write on a report).

GOOD TO KNOW Write access always includes read access. There is no combination where you can change something you cannot see.

Locked activities

An activity can be locked when its assessment is complete. A locked activity is read-only for everyone:

· Every save and delete button is disabled.

· Properties and Activity Feed disappear from the activity's menu.

· Reports stay readable and responses stay viewable — nothing is hidden.

HEADS UP Only a COG Admin can unlock an activity. If you find one locked and still need to work in it, that is an administrator request — see the NSCAT Admin Manual.

PRO TIP Finish and export everything you need before an activity is locked. Generating reports afterwards still works, but nothing can be corrected.

A typical assessment, start to finish

2. Build the survey from the question pool, then preview it.

3. Distribute it — share the link, or produce hard copies.

4. Run interviews and focus groups, recording notes as you go.

5. Record observations as findings emerge.

6. Write recommendations against those observations.

7. Capture lessons learned worth sharing beyond this activity.

8. Read the reports — by question, theme, and demographic.

9. Export what you need, and the activity is closed out and locked.

PRO TIP Steps 4 to 7 overlap in practice. Record observations while the interview is fresh rather than saving them all for the end — the detail that makes a finding persuasive is the first thing to fade.

Working in two languages

NSCAT is available in English and Romanian. Your language is detected from your browser the first time you visit, and the survey link carries a language of its own so respondents can answer in either.

GOOD TO KNOW The survey link includes the language — /survey/<link>/en/ or /survey/<link>/ro/. Sending the right one means respondents do not have to switch it themselves.

Staying signed in

Your session has a fixed lifetime. NSCAT warns you at 30 minutes, 5 minutes, and 1 minute before it expires, with a Re-Login prompt.

HEADS UP Unsaved work does not survive an expired session. If you are part-way through a long survey or a set of interview notes, save first and then re-login when the 30-minute prompt appears — do not dismiss all three.

How to read this manual

· [Getting Started](http://knowledge.services.conexusnuclear.org/books/nscat-user-manual/chapter/getting-started) — signing in, your profile, and finding your way around.

· [Surveys](http://knowledge.services.conexusnuclear.org/books/nscat-user-manual/chapter/surveys) — building, distributing, hard copies, and responses.

· [Interviews & Focus Groups](http://knowledge.services.conexusnuclear.org/books/nscat-user-manual/chapter/interviews-focus-groups) — running them and recording notes.

· [Recording Findings](http://knowledge.services.conexusnuclear.org/books/nscat-user-manual/chapter/recording-findings) — observations, recommendations, lessons learned.

[Reports](http://knowledge.services.conexusnuclear.org/books/nscat-user-manual/chapter/reports) — reading and exporting the analysis.

Signing In & Your Profile

Autosave & Drafts

The Dashboard

Building a Survey

Distributing & Collecting

Hard Copy Surveys

Survey Responses

Interviews

Focus Groups

Observations

Recommendations

Evidence for Recommendations

Lessons Learned

Survey Report

Interview Report

Themes Report

Comparison Report

Data Exports