Occupational noise-related perception and personal protection behavior among Chinese construction workers

Noise emissions from the construction industry, whose harm and hazard take a long time to appear, are random and irregular. Therefore, the occupational health impact imposed by construction noise is constantly underestimated or even ignored. Based on the Health Promotion Model (HPM), this study proposes a conceptual model to understand the link among occupational noise exposure, individual factors, environmental factors, perceptual cognitive factors, and personal protection behavior towards construction noise. A series of hypotheses are further proposed to investigate the relationship between occupational noise-related perception and personal protection behavior among Chinese construction workers. Through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), it was found that noise sensitivity has a remarkable positive impact on workers' noise effect perception and personal protection behavior while noise effect perception plays a mediating role. Besides, safety climate can influence workers' risk perception, and expectation and valuation, in a significantly positive way and has a direct effect on personal protection behavior, meanwhile risk perception, and expectation and valuation play a parallel mediating role without mutual influence. Occupational noise exposure plays a significant negative moderating role between noise sensitivity and noise effect perception, while occupational noise exposure has the same effect on the mediating effect of noise effect perception. These findings deepen the theoretical understandings of construction workers' protection behavior towards construction noise. The study also benefits formulation of reasonable construction noise management scheme in China.