Investigation On Construction Workers’ Safe Behavior Based On Generational Difference Theory

The construction industry has been regarded as one of the most dangerous industries due to its high rate of accident and injury,and in China,accident rate has been ranked as the first place for nine consecutive years across all industries.Accident statistics show that there are significant differences in safety accident rate among workers of different generations.The reason is that intergenerational generation will cause different psychological characteristics of workers towards work,which will lead to the difference of workers’ safety behaviors.Human factors are the key factors for frequent accidents.Improving the level of safety behavior can effectively reduce the occurrence of safety accidents.Therefore,the key to reduce the intergenerational difference in safety accident rates lies in the intergenerational differences in workers’ safety behaviors.However,the current researches on construction workers’ safety behavior are aimed at all workers,and there is no intergenerational division.Therefore,it is particularly important to do research on the intergenerational differences in mechanism of construction workers’ safety behavior.Based on the theoretical and practical deficiencies discussed above,this paper aims to study on the mechanism of construction workers’ safety behavior under the intergenerational division based on the theory of planned behavior,and discusses the differences of mechanism of safety behavior between the new generation workers and the old generation workers.Firstly,based on intergenerational difference theory,the theory of planned behavior and the related literature analysis,we put forward five research hypotheses about the intergenerational differences in the mechanism of safety behavior.After the pre-study of questionnaire,formal questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data,and 276 valid questionnaires were collected.The collected data was then divided into two sub-sample groups: new generation workers(38 years and below)and old generation workers(above 38 years).Based on the collected data,descriptive analysis was firstly carried out with SPSS20.0,then single group structural equation modeling analysis were tested for the total sample,the new generation workers and the old generation workers respectively using SmartPLS 3.2.7.Results show that for the new generation workers,the influencing path between safety attitude and intention is not significant,while other influencing paths are significant.For the old generation workers,two influencing paths between subjective norm,descriptive norm and intention are not significant,and other influencing paths are significant.Then multi-groups analysis was further used to analyze the differences of mechanisms between two generations of workers.Results indicate that: 1)safety attitude is more strongly associated with intention among old generation workers;2)perceived behavioral control is significantly stronger related to safety behaviors among new generation workers than old generation workers;3)descriptive norm is more strongly associated with intention among new generation workers;and 4)subjective norm is more strongly associated with intention among new generation workers.For new generation workers,perceived behavioral control is the strongest predictor in intention towards safety behavior,while safety attitude is the strongest predictor for old generation workers.Based on the empirical results of the differences in the mechanism of safety behavior between two generations of workers,this paper proposes two suitable mechanism models of safety behaviors for the two generations,which provides a theoretical basis for the future study of safety behavior of different generations of construction workers.And this paper also put forward safety behavior improvement measures for the new generation workers and the old generation workers respectively,which will provide reference for the management of construction enterprises.