Measuring Occupational Safety: From Safety Culture to Safety Orientation?

Abstract This paper reviews measures of safety climate and safety culture and uses them as a foundation for a new and more practical construct named ‘safety orientation’. Factors and items from the scales are discussed with respect to factor name and importance, reliability and validity. The analysis suggests that researchers have found it difficult to move from exploratory stages to confirmation and causal stages that would allow agreement on industry standards that could be used as benchmarks. Safety orientation is proposed as an operational construct of safety culture and as a first step towards a more practical instrument for benchmarking safety, so that improvement strategies can be implemented.

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