Safety Climate Measurement In Construction Firms

Construction industry is a dangerous industry all around the world, and theinjuries and fatalities in the industry are always higher than other industries.Traditional measures taken to reduce accidents such as safety technical measures andsafety management methods, can not meet the requirements of humanity and theindustry on safety. The importance of organizational safety culture as well as theinfluence of safety culture on safety performance attracts more and more attentionwith the advancement of practices and research in the area of construction safety.It is necessary to measure the safety climate of construction firms to improve thesafety culture in the construction industry. However, there is seldom safety climatemeasurement practice within the construction industry. In Mainland China, there isn'tquantitative exploration on safety climate except some qualitative discussions. On theother hand, the theory of safety climate sampling method is not developed yet.The selection of percentage of sampling is casual and is not under thedirection of uniform standards.The work of this paper is based on a safety climate comprehensive survey ofGammon Construction Limited, a construction company based in Hong Kong. Theresearch of sampling method was conducted with the data of the comprehensivesurvey, the findings of the sampling research were applied in the safety climatesampling survey on a project of Beijing Construction Group, and the results of thetwo surveys were compared.The research of sampling method is conducted with the data set of theGammon's survey. A safety climate questionnaire originally comprising 87 questionsis shortened to 31 questions. It is found that there is a linear relationship between thepercentage of sampling and the similarity correlation of factor loading matrix and thatsixty percent is a suitable sampling percentage for safety climate survey. Thisresearch links the sampling theory and a complicated statistical method and theresults are meaningful for the later safety climate sampling survey.The sampling method is then applied in the safety climate sampling survey on aproject site of Beijing Construction Group. Factor analysis extracted aneight-factor structure as the dimensions of safety climate. Through thecomparisons between this study and the previous ones, especially the surveyin Gammon, a common safety climate factor structure of construction industrywas proposed. By means of logistic regression, six personal characteristics,including age, education level, work experience in the company, workexperience in the industry, drinking and smoking habit, are found to berelevant to safety climate. Discriminant analysis proves the positive influenceof safety climate on safety behavior and the corresponding weight coefficientswere found.The methodology developed in this paper is useful for similar survey andresearch, and the findings can provide meaningful information to managementand safety practitioners in the construction industry to improve their safetyculture.