Employee attitudes and safety in the chemical industry

Abstract In recent years, there has been growing discussion about the role of human factors in safety, beyond the basic level of errors and slips. This discussion has focused on social psychological issues such as safety attitudes and safety climate. To date, only limited research has attempted to measure these factors and to establish empirically whether and to what degree they are related to safety performance. This paper describes the development of a question set and a set of scales to measure safety attitudes in the chemical industry. A question set comprising ten scales was developed, and used to survey ten chemical sites. The results show that the scales are reliable measures of safety attitude. Further, correlations between the companies' scale scores and accident rates revealed a statistically significant relationship. The results are discussed together with directions for future research.