A COGNITIVE ANALYSIS OF SAFETY-RELATED BEHAVIOUR OF WORKERS WORKING AT HEIGHTS

Abstract

The construction industry is infamous for being dirty, difficult and dangerous. Despite the consistent and tactful improvements in the recent years, the construction industry remains the top contributor for workplace fatalities in Singapore. One of the key concerns in the industry is the management of workers’ safety behaviour. This exploratory study aims to identify and evaluate the cognitive factors influencing the unsafe behaviour of failure to anchor safety harness when working on scaffold. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) was adopted to model the cognitive factors influencing unsafe behaviours of workers. The TPB postulates how attitude, perceived behavioural control, subjective norms would affect intention of workers, and which ultimately affect behaviour. On-site observations and interviews with safety supervisors were conducted to elaborate on the possible underlying reasons for failure to anchor safety harness. A questionnaire was developed based on the primary constructs of TPB and some of the questions were inspired by Zhang and Fang's (2013) journal article. Subsequently, 40 scaffolders from three different construction sites in Singapore were surveyed. Neural Network and Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) were used to analyse the data collected. Statistical techniques such as Pearson Correlation and Stepwise Multiple Regression were adopted to validate the hypotheses. The analysis revealed that subjective norms and secondarily, the intention of workers, were the determinants that significantly influence safety behaviour. Three safety culture actions were recommended to improve workers' perception of safe behaviour , which is influenced by the subjective norms. Due to the exploratory nature of the study, only 40 workers were surveyed. Future studies will improve the questionnaire and collect additional data to improve the validity of the data.