A Spanish translation of Zohar and Luria's safety climate scale and a test of measurement equivalence

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to provide a Spanish-language version of Zohar and Luria’s (Zohar and Luria, 2005) commonly-used safety climate scale using a rigorous translation–back translation process. To refine the translated Spanish-version safety climate scale and ensure its content and face validity, we also conducted six cognitive interviews with Spanish-speaking workers. Both confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and item response theory (IRT) approaches were adopted to test measurement equivalence to ensure the comparability of safety climate scores obtained from the English- and Spanish-language versions of safety climate measures. Data were collected from 12,148 frontline employees within four companies from multiple industries (e.g., construction, and oil and gas). Results from CFA indicated that, although item residuals were heterogeneous between the two versions of the safety climate scales, strong support was found for measurement equivalence with factorial invariance as well as invariant threshold for item rating. Results from IRT also supported strong measurement equivalence of the two versions of the safety climate scales. This study provides a much-needed safety-climate assessment tool for Spanish-speaking workers and paves the way for future research investigating factors related to safety climate for a growing Spanish workforce.