Measurement Equivalence of Trucking Industry- Specific Safety Climate Scales

Abstract

Precise measurement and understanding of employees’ safety climate perception is critical in promotion of a safe environment in an organization. The current study aimed at testing measurement equivalence (ME) of trucking industry-specific safety climate scales. ME refers to whether a psychological assessment system has consistent wording, scaling, and construct scoring across different measurement conditions and consequently can measure the same attributes. For both organization- and group-level safety climate scales, ME was supported to the configural, metric, and partial scalar invariance levels. The findings suggest that the safety climate scales’ measurement structure holds consistent meaning across different trucking companies and the scale scores can be used for comparison of safety climate across different companies and safety climate interventions.