Development and Validation of a Safety Attitude Scale for Coal Miners in China

Xiang Wu,Wenwen Yin,Yuanlong Li,Chunlin Wu

doi:10.3390/su9122165

Abstract

Safety attitude is of vital importance to accident prevention, and the high accident rate in the coal mining industry makes it urgent to undertake research on coal miners’ safety attitude. However, the current literature still lacks a valid and reliable safety attitude measurement scale for coal miners, which stands as a barrier against their safety attitude improvement. In this study, a scale is developed that can be used to measure coal miners’ safety attitude. The preliminary scale was based on an extended literature review. Empirical data were then collected from 725 coal miners using the preliminary scale. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were undertaken to validate and improve the scale. The final scale, which consists of 17 items, contains four dimensions: management safety commitment, team safety climate, fatalism and work pressure. Results show that this safety attitude scale can effectively measure the safety attitude of coal miners, showing high psychological measurement validity. This paper contributes to the occupational safety research by developing the factor structure and indicator system of coal miners’ safety attitude, thus providing more profound interpretation of this crucial construct in the safety research domain. The measurement scale serves as an important tool for safety attitude benchmarking among different coal mining enterprises and, thus, can boost the overall safety improvement of the whole industry. These findings can facilitate improvement of both theories and practices related to occupational safety attitude.

Highlights

Coal mining is one of the riskiest industries [1]
The six dimensions mentioned above are based on the literature research, but may not be applicable to the coal mining industry
An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on the collected data was initially carried out using Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) 22.0 (International Business Machines Corporation, New York, NY, USA)

Summary

Introduction

Coal mining is one of the riskiest industries [1]. In recent years, mining-related accidents have accounted for a significant proportion of all industrial accidents. Studies show that the main cause is unsafe working practices [2]. Employees with a good safety attitude will reduce these unsafe behaviors, avoiding preventable accidents without the need for supervision [3]. Lund and Aaro argued that by changing attitudes and changing behaviors, accidents can be prevented [4]. Altering miners’ safety attitude has become an important means of accident prevention [5,6]

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion