Browsing by Author "Roberts, David Stevens"
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- Development and evaluation of a safety culture survey for occupational safetyRoberts, David Stevens (Virginia Tech, 1995)The present study includes the development, large-scale administration to workers at four industrial plants, and evaluation of the Safety Culture Survey (SCS). The SCS consists of three scales: the Actively Caring Scale (ACS), the Safety Perception Scale (SPS), and the Risk Propensity Scale (RPS). The ACS measures person factors related to one's propensity to actively care for the safety of others. Actively caring (AC) refers to employees caring enough about the safety of their coworkers to act on their behalf. In other words, AC refers to continually looking for environmental hazards and unsafe work practices and implementing appropriate corrective actions when unsafe conditions or behaviors are observed. Included in the ACS is the RAC (reported AC) subscale. The RAC focuses on person, behavior, and environment issues. The RAC also categorizes various levels of AC (i.e., whether employees feel they should, are willing to, or often actively care). The SPS measures employees’ opinions and attitudes about their current safety climate. The scale addresses a variety of safety perceptions, including management concern for safety, peer support for safety, and personal responsibility for safety. The RPS measures person factors hypothesized to relate to an individual's propensity to engage in risky behaviors which increase the likelihood of a "near miss" or an injury. The RPS also includes the injury index subscale (i.e., reports of work-related injuries and illnesses). A stepwise multiple regression found the ACS subscales to predict over 50 percent of the variance in RAC scores. Furthermore, the construct validity of the AC model was supported in a general way. A factor analysis revealed one AC factor and two correlated risk propensity factors. Also, the ACS subscales were more highly correlated with each other than with subscales from the RPS (i.e., variables hypothesized not to predict AC). There were two interesting interactions found among SCS variables. The interaction between focus of AC (behavior, person, environment) and level of AC (should, willing, often) indicated employees were most willing to AC from a behavior-focus, yet least likely to report they often did AC from a behavior-focus. In addition, employees who perceived an unsupportive safety climate (i.e., those with low SPS scores) and who perceived a high level of risk on the job were less likely to AC compared with employees who perceived an unsupportive safety climate and who perceived a low level of risk on the job. This indicated the importance of efforts to increase the visible support of safety efforts as well as assessing safety perceptions before introducing interventions to increase the salience of work-related hazards. Furthermore, a stepwise regression to predict injury rate (i.e., injury index scores) with RPS scores was disappointing, predicting only 5.4 percent of variance in injury index scores. However, when injury index scores were divided into high, medium, and low, significant differences were found among RPS subscale scores. In conclusion, the SCS is presented as a reliable and valid research tool. It can also be used as an applied tool for industry to assess the levels of person factors related to AC behaviors, to assess the perception of management, peer, and personal responsibility for safety efforts, and to help evaluate the effects of interventions designed to bring about a safer workplace.
- Evaluation of a large scale intervention project to increase safety belt use in eight Virginia communitiesRoberts, David Stevens (Virginia Tech, 1991)A large scale intervention program conducted by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles to increase safety belt use in eight communities (cities, towns, and counties) throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia was evaluated. The police or sheriff's department in each community conducted either one, two, or three repeated applications (waves) of public information/education programs. Each target community was matched with a non-treatment control community with a similar population. The overall project was very successful. The mean percent safety belt use for the eight target communities began at 52%, and significantly increased to 73% by the end of the project. The mean percent safety belt use for the eight control communities also began at 52%, and dropped insignificantly to 48% by the end of the project. To extend previous work on the relationship between intervention agents and intervention effectiveness, it was hypothesized that there would be a positive relationship between mean percent safety belt use increase and the agent-to-target ratios (the proportion of police officers or deputies participating in the program per number of citizens in the community), citation-to-target ratios (the proportion of citations or written warnings given during the program per number of citizens in the community), and promotional gimmick-to-target ratios (the proportion of promotional gimmicks given during the program per number of citizens in the community). Each of these ratios were significantly correlated with the percent safety belt use increase for the eight target communities. The terminal model for a stepwise regression procedure, which included the agent-to-target and citation-to-target ratios, yielded an R² of .83. A plan for institutionalizing safety belt programs that would reduce many of the problems associated with motivating large scale safety belt use is suggested, as well as suggestions for future research.