Abstract
Job stress is considered one of the critical causes of construction workers’ unsafe behaviors. As a mainstay industry in many countries, the construction industry has a considerable number of employees and the research on how job stress affects workers’ unsafe behaviors has important theoretical and practical significance to improve construction safety performance through better job stress management. In this study, the authors thoroughly reviewed the literature and conducted semi-structured interviews to identify the dimensions of job stress, designed the job stress scale and cited the safety behavior measurement scale. After that, a questionnaire survey was developed using the proposed measurement scale and distributed to the construction employees from a project in Beijing. One hundred fifty responses were collected and analyzed using reliability analysis to validate the scale’s internal consistency. Results from factor analysis indicate that the scales of job stress measurement can be grouped into six dimensions. To demonstrate the applicability of the developed scale on construction safety management research, the collected data was used to test the hypothesis that job stress has a negative correlation with safety behavior. Results show that the hypothesis is valid, and there is a negative correlation between job stress and safety behavior. In addition, finer results of the relationship between the six dimensions of job stress and safety behavior can be obtained. In summary, this study developed an improved stress scale for construction workers in China, and the proposed scale was validated by analyzing the data from an empirical study in Beijing.
Highlights
With the rapid increase of construction projects in the past several decades, the safety challenges in the construction industry have become increasingly large [1,2]
Before the factor analysis, KMO (Kaiser-Meyer-Oklin Measure of Sampling Adequacy) and Bartlett test of sphericity method are used to analyze whether the original variables correlate, meaning whether it is suitable for factor analysis
Construction workers usually work in complex physical environments amid various hazards such as poorly maintained equipment and unsafe machinery
Summary
With the rapid increase of construction projects in the past several decades, the safety challenges in the construction industry have become increasingly large [1,2]. Workplace safety has improved dramatically in the past few decades, accidents still occur in construction [3]. The research in safety on construction projects is often inadequate [4] because the profit margin is relatively low [5]. This leads to a higher accident rate in the construction industry [6]. The accident rate in construction is about three times as great as that of other industries, and the. Public Health 2018, 15, 2409; doi:10.3390/ijerph15112409 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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