Instrument to Measure Safety Climate: An Application to a Tyre Manufacturing Plant

Abstract

Occupational health and safety is a key feature in good governance. It depends on the safety culture of each and every person relevant to a work place. Culture means people think or act according to their opinions and beliefs by themselves without any external force. Positive safety culture gives benefits to both employee and employer. Therefore, measure the current status of safety culture is important to identify the areas which already improved and areas need to be improved. Safety climate is a descriptive measure that implies the status of the safety culture. Safety climate in a work place can be measured through the employees’ attitudes regarding the work place. A self-administrative questionnaire can be used to collect the data as a productive method. The objective of the study was to develop a questionnaire as an instrument to measure safety climate in a work place through employees’ attitudes and validate the theoretical structure of safety climate with five dimensions. The questionnaire was designed based on literature survey under five dimensions. 30 Likert item questions were used to measure the 5 dimensions and Likert scaling technique was used to measure those five dimensions. Data were collected based on a tire manufacturing plant. Since these dimensions are highly correlated a pilot survey was conducted to identify ambiguities and difficult questions. A representative sample was selected using stratified sampling technique. The reliability of the questionnaire was measured using Chonbach’s Alpha statistic and Split –half Test. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the theoretical structure. According to its results common factor was explained more than 80% of variance in each variables and model diagnostic tests showed that errors were satisfied the assumptions. The goodness of fit statistics showed that fitted model was acceptable. It can be concluded that the theoretically assumed structure to measure the safety climate with five dimensions is acceptable. This study provides a complete guidance on how to measure safety climate through a questionnaire and any interested parties may able to make their own measuring system based on the study.