Determination of elements for technical and vocational education and training (TVET) safety culture maturity measurement preliminary framework.

Abstract

Occupational safety is vital and should be prioritised in the public sector's critical performance agenda. Strong safety culture is able to address safety issues. In researching safety culture measures, education sectors such as technical and vocational education and training (TVET) remain ambiguous. This paper describes the work undertaken to develop and evaluate the components of a preliminary research framework for assessing the maturity of safety culture in TVET institutions, i.e., polytechnics, by adapting the existing safety culture maturity (SCM) model with local guidelines documents to the studied organisation. Experts consented to participate in this study and validated the proposed elements under four primary constructs using the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM). The proposed elements must adhere to three FDM principles to be retained: 1) Threshold value (d) ≤ 0.2, 2) Expert Consensus Percentage > 75.0% and 3) Fuzzy score (A) value of α - cut = > 0.5. The construct's threshold (d) value is also accepted with the value (d) 0.2 or less. The selected elements are then used to develop the subsequent phase's framework content. The identified elements are used as components of a preliminary research framework and as an initial point for the established SCM measurement framework for the Polytechnic.