Semantic Network Analysis Using Construction Accident Cases to Understand Workers' Unsafe Acts.

Suhyun Kang,Sangyong Kim,Sungmin Yun,Sunyoung Cho

doi:10.3390/ijerph182312660

Abstract

Unsafe acts by workers are a direct cause of accidents in the labor-intensive construction industry. Previous studies have reviewed past accidents and analyzed their causes to understand the nature of the human error involved. However, these studies focused their investigations on only a small number of construction accidents, even though a large number of them have been collected from various countries. Consequently, this study developed a semantic network analysis (SNA) model that uses approximately 60,000 construction accident cases to understand the nature of the human error that affects safety in the construction industry. A modified human factor analysis and classification system (HFACS) framework was used to classify major human error factors—that is, the causes of the accidents in each of the accident summaries in the accident case data—and an SNA analysis was conducted on all of the classified data to analyze correlations between the major factors that lead to unsafe acts. The results show that an overwhelming number of accidents occurred due to unintended acts such as perceptual errors (PERs) and skill-based errors (SBEs). Moreover, this study visualized the relationships between factors that affected unsafe acts based on actual construction accident case data, allowing for an intuitive understanding of the major keywords for each of the factors that lead to accidents.

Highlights

The construction industry is one of the most hazardous industries in the world, and many studies have shown that unsafe behavior by people is a major cause of construction accidents [1,2,3,4,5]
These accidents can be attributed to unsafe conditions in the workplace, that is, physical factors such as when the workplace environment is inadequate, and unsafe acts by workers, that is, human factors such as inappropriate responses by workers to hazardous situations [6,7,8,9]
It can be seen that most of the extracted keywords that both factors had in common were from accidents that occurred during demolition and dismantling work (18.63%) and installation work

Summary

Introduction

The construction industry is one of the most hazardous industries in the world, and many studies have shown that unsafe behavior by people is a major cause of construction accidents [1,2,3,4,5]. These accidents can be attributed to unsafe conditions in the workplace, that is, physical factors such as when the workplace environment is inadequate, and unsafe acts by workers, that is, human factors such as inappropriate responses by workers to hazardous situations [6,7,8,9]. In order to understand such human error, studies have reviewed accident cases and analyzed their causes [10,14,15]

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion