Assessment of underreporting factors on construction safety incidents in US construction projects

Underreporting of incidents is detrimental to safety performance. This study assessed factors affecting underreporting by studying the incidence of these factors on projects with good and bad recordkeeping. After conducting thorough literature review, questionnaires A and B were developed. Data obtained from previous research and these two questionnaires were converted to RIDIT scores. Then, the correlation between the data of previous research and the data of questionnaire A and the correlation between the data of previous research and the data of questionnaire B were calculated. The significance of the difference between the correlations of these two independent samples supports the findings of previous research and presents evidence that demonstrates the incidence of these factors is more frequent on projects where the project safety team is doubtful about the accuracy of reporting. The findings emphasize the need to address underreporting factors in companies' efforts towards obtaining more accurate safety reporting.