Climate measuring

For scales to measure other safety-related factors, the reader can consult Costa and Anderson (2011) for trust measures Zohar (2000) for safety climate measures Barling et al. (2002) for safety consciousness Sneddon et al. (2013) for situational awareness Neal and Griffin (2006) for safety participation and compliance Chmiel (2005) for bending the rules Cox and Cox (1991) for safety skepticism Neal et al. (2000) for safety knowledge and safety motivation Tucker et al. (2008) for employee safety voicing Tucker et al. (2008) for perceived organizational and perceived co-worker support for safety and Diaz-cabera et al. (2007) for safety culture. Another good source of information on safety measures are meta-analyses (e.g., Christian et al. 2009 Clarke 2006). 

Mueller, L., DaSilva, N., Townsend, J., Tetrick L. (1999). An empirical evaluation of competing safety climate measurement models. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Atlanta, GA. 

Safety culture (and/or climate) measures may themselves be regarded as proxy measures of safety in the sense outlined above. However, few studies have found these measures to be strongly related to hard risk outcomes such as injuries and accidents (Guldemnund 2000 The Health Foundation 2011). There are several reasons for this apparent lack of correlation. Safety climate or culture is, by definition, shared within a social unit (a work group), but such units are usually ill defined and small. Safety climate or culmre is multi-faceted, and each facet is a constract, as described in the previous sections of this chapter, based on a few items from a questionnaire. Although the reliability and the intra-class correlation for the constructs can be acceptable, repeated measurements are typically infeasible, and when the questionnaire has been applied repeatedly, its responsiveness (the ability of the constract to reliable measure changes over time (de Vet et al. 2011)) is usually not reported but can be expected to be low. At the same time, since... 

Tumberg, W. and Daniell, W. 2008. Evaluation of a healthcare safety climate measurement tool. Journal of Safety Research, 39, 563-8. 

Balancing Adoption of an Existing Safety Climate Measure and the Need for Adaptation to National Characteristics... 

Standards for Psychometric Testing of Safety Climate Measures... 

Blekkenhorst, F., Nagel Soepenberg, E., and Schoen, J. P. (1991). Results of a new cyclic corrosion test for automotive steel products based upon micro-climate measurement in running vehicles, 3rd Int. Zinc Coated Steel Sheet Conf., Preprint S3D, 13 pp. 

The climatic measurement was occurred using Xentest 150-S chamber at T=35°C with the day-night program. 

Cooper M D and Phillips R A (1994). Validation of a Safety Climate Measure. Occupational Psychology Conference of the British Psychological Society, 3-5 January, Birmingham, UK... 

Climatic measures will have some effect if the alteration process is affected by the climate modification. However, if the alteration processes is, e.g., related to successive infiltration cases of a salt with equilibrium relative humidity as related by Alves and Sequeira Braga (2000), environmental control could be ineffective (unless the option is a very high humidity environment near 100 %). In these cases it will necessary to fight the pollutants sources. 

The research into safety culture has led to the use of safety climate measurement tools as a Safety Performance Indicator (Guldenmund, 2000) but the results are largely intangible and may not help organizations identify where they need to focus attention in order to improve safety (Sorenson, 2002). The lack of a generally accepted definition for safety culture or safety chmate also limits their usefulness as concepts since they do not support a systemic methodology for their measurement (Zhang et al., 2002). 

Dedobbeleer, N. and Beland, F., 1991. A safety climate measure for construction... 

Furthermore, whereas school reform movements have inspired renewed hope for urban schools, there is less evidence that these reforms are sufficient to impact children with mental health difficulties, especially for children living in urban communities. Historically, school reforms have been difficult to implement and often conflict on key goals. For example, there is no clear consensus on how to define school climate, in part because of the failure of any climate measure to predict school performance reliably, and many of these characteristics are not easily amenable to intervention, especially by mental health staff who lack the authority and resources to effect such changes (Boyd Shouse, 1997). 

Over 60% of the 36 bivariate positive correlations among theorized climate measures were at least moderate (.40 < r <. 73), the highest correlation being between Involvement and Faculty Support suggesting that students perceive faculty as being more supportive as faculty involvement in students academic lives increased (figure 5.1). 

Figure 5-1 Means, Standard Deviations, and Correlation among Theorized Climatic Measures (N=867)...

Next we determined that the nine theorized climate measures were intercorrelated and that student data could be aggregated. We then conducted a confirmatory factor analysis which yielded nine data-driven factors. We correlated these with the theorized measures to determine if the two sets of measures were related. Except for three factors from the data-driven results that did not distinctively capture specific theorized climate measures, over half (42) of the 81 zero-order correlations were at least moderate (.40 < r < 1.0) indicating that the results of the two factor analyses were comparable. For example. Factor 1 of the data-driven result included Involvement and Faculty Support of the theorized measures. 

Figure 5 2 Means, Standard Deviations, and Agreement on Climate Measures among Students by Departments and Programs... 

One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no statistically significant race/ethnic differences in the theorized climate measures. In other words, each of the nine climate measures was similarly perceived across racial/ethnic groups. For example. Institutional Support had the lowest means (3.09 for Blacks 2.87 for Hispanics and 2.75 for Whites) which would be indicative of students across the ethnic groups having mixed perceptions on institutional support (Af 3.0), this measure also had the largest variances showing that the racial/ethnic group differences were minimal. 

---