The main challenges of safety science

Abstract

Safety science can be viewed as a messy field, although it has developed many different types of accident models (or theories and metaphors) and methodologies of analysis in recent decades. As a young field of research, safety science currently faces many challenges. First, among safety researchers, there is no consensus on how to answer the question “what is the object of safety science?”. In this article, we address the wide-ranging debate over this issue. Second, many safety researchers still debate the scope of safety science. The main viewpoints on this issue are briefly reviewed and discussed. Third, it is controversial whether there is a uniform paradigm of safety science. Fourth, if safety science is viewed as a pure science, it seems that there is no falsifiable model or theory, although many models and theories do exist. Last but not least, there is a professional identity crisis in the safety science community because the field has probably not helped people see this scientific community as a group of safety researchers and professionals. This article is neither a review nor a research study but rather an overview of the main challenges of safety science that we should prioritize in the future.