Occupational Medicine & Health Affairs
Open Access

Abstract

Safety climate can help to estimate employees? motivation to work safely, which affects theirs safety behaviors. Departing from a literature review, a set of factors affecting safety climate on construction sites were identified. The model proposed was reviewed by a panel of six Portuguese evaluators with relevant tecnhical expertise and tested, conducting real case studies by ?peer? reviews by a pool of 11 safety experts from Brazil (2), Greece (3), Portugal (3) and Turkey (3). Safety climate deals with perceptions which are fuzzy by nature and its assessment process involves complexity and uncertainty. Fuzzy sets theory is a better mathematical framework to estimate safety climate because uncertainty represented on fuzzy systems is a nonstatistical uncertainty, which express vagueness, imprecision and/or ambiguity trough fuzzy membership functions, and has a different nature from statistical uncertainty that is based on the laws of probability and is resolved through observations. Estimate safety climate is of particular value to avoid the occurrence of work-related illness and accidents. This work provides a suitable tool, which include 59 questionnaire items. For rating the items, a linguistic variable with 6 semantic terms was developed for helping to understand and evaluate safety climate in the RAOS process.

Biography