Surveys/questionnaires attitudes

Etchegaray, J.M. and Thomas, E.J. 2012. Comparing two safety culture surveys Safety Attitudes Questionnaire and Hospital Survey on Patient Safety. BMJ... 

Other key ideas within the cognitive theories that are often employed within social research are those of values, attitudes and beliefs (Baron et a/. 2006). These elements are often seen as the basic criteria of many social phenomena, including the highly complex concept of culture, although it is attitudes, the inherent disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object/person/ event (Aronson et a/. 2007), that are most frequently used, due to their accessibility through tools such as questionnaires or observed behaviours (Ajzen 2005). In construction, safety management often draws on this way of thinking in the use of safety climate surveys. 

Source Annual questionnaire surveys of British Social Attitudes Survey, Social and Community Planning Research. 

In order to investigate occupational physicians (OPs) everyday tasks and duties, tiieir opinion, attitudes and perceptions towards their cooperation with employers and working environment specialist, questionnaire surveys were conducted by authors in 2002 and 2009. 

Around 2004 the first safety culture tools designed for healthcare began to appear. Maity of these tools are in the form of survey instruments or questioimaires, the two most well-known being the Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSPSC) developed by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ - Sexton et al. 2006). Both instruments are described in detail within the book and illustrated with... 

Hingorani, M., Wong, T. and Vafidis, G. 1999. Patients and doctors attitudes to amount of information given after unintended injury during treatment Cross sectional, questionnaire survey. BMJ, 318(7184), 640-41. 

Research has been carried out to test the psychometric properties of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire and AHRQ Hospital Safety Culture Survey (Nieva and Sorra 2003 Sexton et al. 2006 Sorra and Nieva 2004). However, there have been important misapplications of survey tools in healthcare. A proliferation of climate surveys now exist, including many where the factor stmcture and construct validity have not been tested. Many hospitals have developed their own bespoke survey tools and these are poorly designed because basic survey design rules have not been followed. One common issue is surveys that do not counter-balance positive and negative statements, thus increasing the risk of response set bias where the... 

Patient safety researchers have developed several surveys to assess patient safety climate, including the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ), AHRQ s Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (SOPS see Chapter 12 for more detailed information), and Patient Safety Climate in Healthcare Organizations. Our chapter provides an in-depth examination of the SAQ in terms of what it measures, key findings and limitations and future areas in need of research. 

Even so, I designed my study to minimize this potential risk Unless indicated otherwise, my precautions follow Podsakoff et al. (2003] The questionnaire was checked by the person responsible for disseminating the survey in each Arm for its unequivocality. In the introduction, anonymity was assured to all participants. I posed specific questions about product use and behavior in the firm, rather than about abstract attitudes (Cote and Buckley 1987], Questions relating to predictor and criterion variables were intermingled rather than sequential and used different types of scales (Likert scales, ordinal scales, semantic differentials]. If possible, I excluded reverse coded items as they may favor common method bias (DiStefano and Motl 2006]. 

As we have discussed, changes in an environment and behaviors can be assessed directly through systematic observations changes in knowledge, perceptions, police, attitudes, and intentions are only assessable indirectly through survey techniques, usually questionnaires [2]. 

Assess. Survey the culture to determine prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to safety and the environment by way of confidential questionnaires (perception survey), interviews (independent review process), focus group meetings, and visits to assess workplace conditions and possible contributions to incidents [4]. We will cover this in more detail in Chapter 17. 

Attitudes about inequality as based on a question from the 1990-2004 questionnaires of the World Values Survey, which asks respondents to score their attitudes on a scale with incomes should be made more equal at one end and we need larger income differences as incentives for individual efforts at the other. We hypothesize that spending will be higher when more people believe in the need for greater equality. 

The general consensus within the literatnre is that assessing employee attitudes alone is not satisfactory when wishing to measnre an organization s safety culture, as they can only elicit safety perceptions and attitndes (HSE, 2005a). Other methods that can be used in addition to safety culture questionnaires include observational studies, focus groups, interviews, case studies, surveys, and qnestionnaires. 

Attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs were presmned to influence whether the intervention is accepted and has potential for long-term success. We all agreed, though, that survey techniques to estimate these subjective person states are relatively difficult to develop and evaluate. Issues of questionnaire reliability and validity need to be addressed as I discuss later in this chapter. 

Throughout this Handbook, I have presented various questionnaires that assess particular person states to gauge reactions to interventions. Such evaluation tools are not as objective and directly applicable to process improvement as feedback charts from behavioral observations. Results of surveys to measure perceptions, attitudes, or person states... 

In Chapter 5, we introduced the concept of SHE culture. It deals with shared values and beliefs of the members of an industrial organisation that determine their commitment to the organisation s SHE management systems and achievements. We will here use the term safety climate to denote such aspects of an organisation that are possible to measure by use of a questionnaire-based survey and where the results meet statistical criteria for aggregation to the organisational level (Cox and Elin, 1998). Results of such attitude surveys are used as performance indicators at the organisational level. 

Types of surveys range from employee opinion, attitude, satisfaction, engagement, and performance to name several. If a questionnaire is to be used, the development of the survey instrument requires special expertise so that it is not skewed toward conscious or unconsciously desired results. 

These general findings must however be read against two other factors. First, there are marked cultural differences in attitudes to a whole range of things, not just work. Persons growing up in different cultures become socialized into the values of their culture. Their responses to questionnaire surveys concerned with attitudes to work will tend to reflect these broad values. Second, people s responses to... 

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