UNDERSTANDING CROWD BEHAVIOUR TO IMPROVE SAFETY OF CONCERTGOERS - A STUDY OF POP CONCERTS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Attending concerts are getting increasingly popular among the younger generation in Singapore. Concerts tend to attract large crowds which may result in crowd management issues and crowd safety-related incidents if the large crowds are not managed properly. This research aims to study the different types of crowd behaviour present at pop concerts in Singapore as it has not been studied before. Additionally, it investigates the effectiveness of the current crowd management, analyses the different types of crowd behaviour and safety consequence factors and compares the crowd behaviours against safety consequence factors to see the correlation between both variables.

To gather information and findings for this research, two different sets of questionnaires were sent out electronically to event companies and pop concertgoers respectively. Thereafter, the findings from the respondents were analysed using the IBM SPSS Statistics software, showing the frequencies and mean rankings of the different types of crowd behaviours, factors affecting crowd behaviour and safety consequence factors. Spearman’s Rank-Order Correlation Coefficient (SRCC) and Binomial test were also used in the analysis of results to test for the correlation between each crowd behaviour and each safety consequence factor and the validation of the hypotheses.

The results from the analysis showed that ambulatory crowd, dense crowd and rushing crowd are the most commonly seen crowd behaviours at pop concerts held in Singapore. These three crowd types have the strongest correlation with the safety consequence factors. Furthermore, the results also supported that the current crowd management is effective but there is still room for improvement.

Nevertheless, this research is limited to only large-scale concerts (pre and post-concert) and assumptions were made to select the crowd behaviours relevant to in the Singapore context.