Safety climate factors and its relationship with accidents and personal attributes in the chemical industry

Safety in the chemical industry is a major issue in a thickly populated country like India. The study was carried out to determine the safety climate factors in the chemical industry in Kerala, India. A Survey using a questionnaire was conducted among 2536 employees in eight major accident hazard chemical industrial units in Kerala. The study population included workers and first line supervisors at the lowest end of the management. 75% of the data collected was subjected to principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation using SPSS program. This revealed 8 factors which together explained 52.15% of the total variance. Internal consistency (Cronbach Alpha) across items in each of the 8 factors and that of the total scale were found acceptable. The model was tested with the remaining data by running confirmatory factor analysis using the AMOS 4.0 structural equation modeling program and was found to produce a good fit. The safety climate scores calculated were found to have significant negative correlation with self-reported accident rates revealing good predictive validity. One way ANOVA results show that companies' mean safety climate scores differ significantly from each other indicating that organizations have different safety climate levels. Tests were also conducted to find out the effects of qualification, age, job category and experience of respondents on their perceptions and attitudes about safety. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.