Identification of Safety-Related Opinion Leaders among Construction Workers: Evidence from Scaffolders of Metro Construction in Wuhan, China.

Chaohua Xiong,Kongzheng Liang,Ivan Fung,Hanbin Luo

doi:10.3390/ijerph15102176

Abstract

This study aimed to reveal opinion leaders who could impact their coworkers’ safety-related performance in Chinese construction teams. Questionnaires were distributed to 586 scaffolders in Wuhan to understand their opinions about influencing their coworkers, serving as the foundation for a social network analysis to identify the potential opinion leaders among workers. A further controlled trial with the identified workers was conducted to select real opinion leaders by comparing their influence on others’ safety-related behavior, followed by an association analysis to profile these opinion leaders. Two main sources of opinion leaders were identified: foremen and seasoned workers. Implementing interventions through opinion leaders resulted in better safety-related behavior performance. Furthermore, compared with education level, the association analysis results indicated that one’s practical skills and familiarity with respondents was more important in the formulation of opinion leaders. This research introduces the concept of opinion leaders into construction safety and proposes an approach to identify and validate opinion leaders within a crew, thus providing a tool to improve behavior promotion on sites, as well as a new perspective for viewing interactions among workers.

Highlights

The construction industry is widely known as one of the most dangerous industries
Network centrality measures the structural importance of actors and indicates which actor is in the center of the network
In order to use the social network method to identify opinion leaders related to unsafe behaviors, Gephi was used to map the networks consisting of nodes and edges

Summary

Introduction

Research from many nations has shown that construction workers still suffer from a higher proportion of occupational injuries and fatalities compared with other industries [1,2,3,4]. Numerous studies have been conducted on various topics from the individual level, such as worker behavior and competency [5,6,7], to enterprise-level work, such as focusing on the safety costs of construction firms [8,9]. As a trend in the organizational level studies, interrelationships among workers and different roles in construction safety on sites have been considered [10]. Researchers focused on the special roles among coworkers on sites. Fang et al implied that the foremen onsite are an important factor influencing workplace safety management [13]

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Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion