Analysis of business safety performance by structural equation models

Domestic safety performance, which has had gained increasingly greater importance in recent years, is the subject of many studies. However, studies on the application of the structural equation model (SEM) in systematic safety performance model fitness verifications remain scarce. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the safety performance with the aim at one private representative chemical and food company in Taiwan, for providing the strategy and improvement consult in safety management. In order to obtain the best-fit safety performance model, the Amos 17.0 (Analysis of Moment Structure 17.0) was used to construct a series of SEM competition models to confirm the four various orientations of the safety performance model through the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) method. The results showed that the first-order multi-factor oblique model and second-order single-factor safety performance model were the best-fit models. The results of this study will contribute to the related enterprises' ability to assess the safety indicators and will also be an even greater contribution to the future development of enterprise security. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.