Development and validation of the Design-for-Safety (DfS) climate measurement tool

Abstract

Design-for-Safety (DfS) is a promising intervention to address safety and health risks in construction. At the same time, past research on construction safety and health consistently emphasized the importance of measuring safety climate in ensuring good safety performance. However, existing construction safety climate measurement tools are focused on measuring construction workers’ perception of safety management within their projects or organizations. Therefore, existing construction safety climate construct and measurement tools cannot be directly applied in the DfS context, which is focused on the upstream project team comprising designers and developers. Thus, the DfS climate construct and a corresponding measurement instrument were created. DfS climate is defined as project team members’ shared perceptions of the DfS policies, practices, and procedures that arise from the behaviours they observe getting rewarded, supported, and expected. With a sample of 242 responses, the questionnaire was subjected to exploratory factor analysis. The instrument consisted of 19 questions. These questions were split into five dimensions: participation of leader, member cooperation, member participation, project resources, and expectations for stakeholder representation. The study found that DfS climate was linked to outcome variables such as whether design changes arising from DfS review would be incorporated into the design. The research makes an academic contribution by creating the concept of DfS climate, accounting for the cognitive aspect of performing DfS. In addition, practical contributions are made as organizations can measure the DfS climate for their projects and find areas to improve.