Audits to Performance Measures

A key characteristic of an audit that is seldom examined is the link between audit performance and safety performance in the workplace. For example, if the objective of an audit is to evaluate accident prevention strategies in the workplace, then there should be some type of correlation or relationship between performance in the audit and accident history. All too often, audits are developed and items appear on them because they should be a part of the safety program, when in actuality some activities 

The objective in making and using an effective audit tool for the purpose of measuring safety performance is to determine the correlation between the audit, its individual items, and the safety performance measure. 

Audit instruments can be evaluated on the basis of three different types of validity when linking the audit to safety performance. These are content-related, criterion-related, and construct-related procedures for accumulating evidence of validity (Anastasi 1988, 139). Content-related validity involves the examination of the audit content to determine whether it covers a representative sample of the behaviors to be measured. Criterion-related validity procedures indicate the effectiveness of an audit in predicting performance in specified activities. The performance on the audit is checked against a criterion that is considered a direct and independent measure of what the audit was intended to measure. The third type of validity, construct validity, is the extent to which the audit is said to be measuring a theoretical construct or trait. Construct validation requires accumulation of information from a variety of sources. 

---