Short Chronicle of the FIRE Project

© OWMS / IdF NRW

  • 2015: Start of the Cooperation

    New requirements of the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of the Interior made it necessary to revise the existing leadership training at the State Fire Institute North Rhine-Westphalia (IdF NRW) in 2015. On the one hand, this involved standardizing the training of volunteer and full-time group leaders. On the other hand, the training courses for volunteer platoon leaders were shortened from three to two weeks.
    To test these new training course concepts, a measuring instrument was needed that would allow a comparison between the previous training courses and the new concepts. On the initiative of the IdF NRW, a cooperation with the Organizational and Business Psychology at the University of Münster was established. Together they set the goal of developing a set of instruments that could measure the practical benefits experienced by course participants in all types of courses.

  • 2015 - 2019: Development of Several Evaluation Tools

    Based on relevant literature and interviews with lecturers and course participants of the IdF NRW, the FIRE core questionnaire was first developed and then validated (Schulte & Thielsch, 2019). With the help of this questionnaire, reliable information on the performance of the new course concept could be collected.
    Due to the successful use of the FIRE core questionnaire, further FIRE questionnaires were developed, e.g. for the evaluation of one-day seminars or exams. In addition, additional modules were created, which can be used, for example, for the evaluation of individual group work or operational exercises.
    Many students of psychology became involved in the project during this period and visited the IdF NRW in the context of excursions or final theses. In total, seven excursions as well as 22 bachelor and master theses (some of them still ongoing) have been realized so far.

  • 2019 - 2022: Intensification of the Cooperation in FIRE II

    As early as 2018, the IdF NRW and the Department of Organisational Psychology at the University of Münster agreed to expand their cooperation. The FIRE II project has been running since October 2019. It is funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The aim of this project is to analyse the effectiveness of IdF NRW's training courses over longer periods of time. It also focuses on research into teamwork and leadership in high-risk contexts.
    The online survey panel FIRE Feedback was launched at the beginning of 2021. Since then, the panel has been used to conduct scientific surveys and studies specifically tailored to emergency services, including over longer periods of time.

  • 2023: Beginning of FIRE III

    The successful collaboration between the IdF NRW and the organisational psychology department at the University of Münster is being continued in the FIRE III project.